Author: Frances Monroe

Somewhere on the outskirts of a British town in early spring, there is a certain type of morning where the birds begin to sing well in advance of any reasonable hour. It felt like a gift once. It is now beginning to feel more like a warning to researchers who are keeping a close eye on it. For centuries, one of the most reliable sounds in the British countryside has been the dawn chorus, a layered, nearly disorganized flood of birdsong that rises in the hour before sunrise. Great tits, song thrushes, robins, and blackbirds all contribute to the cacophony…

Not too long ago, the wetlands surrounding Zapotlán el Grande used to fill every winter with the kind of noise that would stop you in your tracks and just listen. clusters of pink-flushed roseate spoonbills. At dusk, ducks fly low over the surface of the lagoon. In the shallows, storks stood motionless as if they owned the area. Researchers at the Universidad de Guadalajara claim that this period is diminishing, and the causes are more related to decades of cumulative harm to the environment these birds rely on than to chance. Carlos Palomera García and Jesús Alberto Espinosa, two biologists…

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over Pennsylvania farm country when something is wrong. Drive through Lancaster County on any given morning and the fields look the same — flat, wide, and impossibly green. But behind those neat rows and red barns, farmers are navigating a season that has piled crisis on top of crisis in ways that are genuinely hard to keep up with. Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding has been at the center of most of it. In June 2026, his office issued a quarantine order limiting animal movement across the state, citing rising concern over…

The Danube Delta has a certain kind of silence that is layered rather than just quiet. Beds of reed rustle. A pelican dropping heavily into the water. Somewhere in the channels, the far-off engine of a fishing boat. It’s the kind of place where abstract conservation language becomes suddenly tangible. This is what people mean when they discuss safeguarding migratory flyways. Paul Goriup, an ornithologist and conservationist, has spent years working in and around the ecosystems that run through Eastern Europe, observing what happens when frameworks for protection are in place in one nation but vanish at the next border.…

The American redstart is a small warbler found in Jamaica. It lives silently in the island’s forests for the majority of the year, eating insects while it waits for the ideal opportunity to start its arduous journey north to breed. However, that moment has been coming later and later in recent years. The insects are no longer present as they once were. The ecosystem has dried up. In an attempt to make up for time it might never fully recover, the bird waits—and waits—until it is forced to take off quickly, flying faster and harder than it should. That tale,…

A backyard chicken coop hidden behind a suburban home has an almost pastoral quality; a few hens clucking through the afternoon is a tiny step toward self-sufficiency. In North America and much of the world, this scene has become remarkably commonplace over the last ten years. One of the fastest-growing segments of small-scale poultry keeping has been quietly constructed by urban homesteaders, hobby farmers, and families in mid-sized subdivisions. It has a healthy vibe. Most likely, it is. However, public health researchers and veterinarians are also becoming more and more concerned about it. Property lines and good intentions are not…

The size of the sheds or the sound of ventilation fans won’t be the first thing you notice when you approach a high-security chicken farm these days. It’s the admissions procedure. The gate has a shower room. Before being permitted to be anywhere close to the birds, workers undress, wash thoroughly, and change into brand-new farm clothes. It has a clinical, nearly surgical feel. This would have seemed excessive a few years ago. Now, it seems like the bare minimum to farms that have survived an avian flu outbreak in their area or witnessed nearby operations being shut down overnight.…

A shipment of roosters, raised on farms throughout the American South and Southwest, is loaded into crates and given to a front company with an unremarkable name somewhere in a warehouse in the Dallas area. Those birds are on a commercial flight headed for the Philippines in a matter of days. Most of them die within a week. This isn’t a covert operation operating out of a lawless border town. It travels through major airports and is handled like regular cargo by airlines like Korean Air and Philippine Airlines. Despite the fact that transporting fighting birds across state or national…

When the machines depart from a wetland, a certain kind of silence descends. That quiet came years ago in areas of Bulakan and Obando, which were formerly home to some of Luzon’s most productive coastal nesting grounds. Mangroves fell. Reclaimed land was used to bury fishponds. And the birds that had visited these mudflats on a seasonal basis for many generations ceased to do so. There was more than just an ecological loss that ensued. It took too long to hear the warning. The coastal area of Bulacan has been under stress for many years. Communities in Bulakan, Perez, and…

At one point, Dr. Gretchen Daily is running through the undergrowth with a butterfly net somewhere deep within a Costa Rican coffee plantation. No cell phone service. No gatherings. Just insects, data, and the kind of fieldwork that would change the way governments from Beijing to Nassau make decisions about forests, water, and land years later. Although it’s a small picture, it conveys a significant message about this scientist’s work: she is grounded in reality, even though her ideas are now being discussed in development banks and boardrooms. Daily is a co-founder of the Natural Capital Project, or NatCap, and…