Author: Frances Monroe

Just before sunrise in the spring, you could hear something amazing in a certain area of central Illinois. For over a mile, a low, hollow booming sound that resembled someone blowing across a bottle’s mouth rolled across the grass. It originated from the elaborate ritual of male greater prairie chickens stamping their feet and puffing orange throat sacs while gathered on their ancestral breeding grounds, known as leks. The Great Plains used to be home to millions of these birds. In Illinois, there are currently fewer than 200 left in the wild. Now, the booming grounds are largely quiet. It…

Something seems strange when you stroll along the rocky coastlines of southern Peru or the beaches of central California. The number of seals being hauled out on the rocks has decreased. Locals no longer find the carcasses particularly noteworthy. However, because H5N1 avian influenza is killing these animals and is spreading in ways that were unlikely even a few years ago, scientists are keeping a close eye on the situation. Marine spillover is a term that researchers are increasingly using to describe this pattern. It describes the point at which a virus that started in wild birds spreads to coastal…

If you go outside at midnight on a clear April evening and remain motionless long enough, you may be able to hear it: a faint, high-pitched chip floating down from the darkness above. Then one more. Then a dozen more, hardly audible, drifted by like distant radio static. They are thrushes, warblers, and sparrows. Invisible and leisurely, hundreds of millions of them moved northward through the night sky, following paths their ancestors had charted long before cities existed below. We were largely unaware that this was taking place for the majority of human history. The first significant clue was discovered…

If you spend enough time standing close to any working port, you will begin to notice things. The diesel odor. Cranes’ low mechanical hum. And the birds, or where they once were, if you look up. Some sections of the coast that were formerly teeming with shearwaters and storm-petrel colonies are strangely silent now. It’s not overly dramatic. It doesn’t garner media attention. However, it’s the kind of silence that is hard to ignore once you notice it. The magnitude of the seabird decline, which has been going on for decades, is truly unsettling. Between 1950 and 2010, the global…

After fifteen years of testing cameras, there is a certain level of trust. You’ve held enough of them to be able to distinguish between manufacturers who are actually making progress and those who are merely rearranging the specifications. For titles like Amateur Photographer and Digital Camera World, as well as more recently for Canon’s own video production projects, Timothy Coleman, Cameras Editor at TechRadar, has spent that much time experimenting with mirrorless bodies, bridge cameras, action cams, and everything in between. Therefore, his statement that a camera is flawless has some weight. Four weeks prior to the Sony A7R VI’s…

Every few hundred meters along Putah Creek in Yolo County, west of Davis, nestboxes are affixed to orchard trees and fence posts. Every week, volunteers measure the chicks, count the eggs, and record the dates. Since 2000, this meticulous and patient work has been ongoing. Researchers are now learning something they didn’t fully anticipate from the data those boxes generated. Birds are arriving early. Not a couple of days. In certain instances, they are almost a month ahead of where the historical record indicates they ought to be. Even though it seems insignificant, that change has a significant impact on…

Inside a photography blind, there’s a certain silence. It’s not the cozy quiet of an empty room or a stroll through the forest, but something more demanding—a quiet you have to keep, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Without fully extending your arms, you can touch the tent’s fabric on both sides. Outside, the light changes. The birds never show up. You wait. This is something that most people will never encounter. Most people wouldn’t decide to. However, living in the blind is just the approach for a small, strangely committed group of wildlife photographers. The only one that functions.…

From the outside, the crates didn’t appear to be much. The kind of cargo that passes through Philippine ports on a daily basis without anyone noticing it has standard packaging and labeling. However, when they were pulled aside for examination by Bureau of Customs officials at the Zamboanga port, they discovered something quite different: dozens of rare parrots that were alive, under stress, and headed for Tokyo. This type of discovery is not as frequently featured on the front page as it ought to be. Seizures of wildlife are often overlooked in favor of more serious news, treated more like…

During a COVID lockdown in Brisbane, three researchers made the decision to count every living thing in their shared home. They knew what they were doing because they were trained ecologists. The number was what caught them off guard. The property was home to 1,150 different species by the end of their year-long census, including plants, animals, fungi, things with too many legs, and things with none at all. Prior to the survey, the average ecologist they polled estimated 200. The discrepancy between people’s perceptions and what actually coexists with them in suburban areas is precisely the kind of issue…

Every fall, somewhere over the Susquehanna River Valley in upstate New York, the sky quietly fills. Warblers and barn swallows move south in the dark, following paths they’ve been using for thousands of years. You wouldn’t know it standing outside — no sound, no visible mass — but the radar tells a different story. On peak nights, hundreds of millions of birds are airborne across the continent simultaneously, following corridors as old as the continent itself. Researchers call them flyways. What they’re noticing now is that those corridors are beginning to fray. At Binghamton University, ecologists have been paying close…