Author: Frances Monroe

Hearing an unidentified bird’s song gives you a certain kind of satisfaction. That’s how things have always been. However, for the majority of human history, recognizing that sound required carrying around a bulky field guide, squinting at fuzzy illustrations, and relying on your memory. Millions of people just take out their phones these days. Once associated with retired professors in khaki vests standing in marshes at dawn, birdwatching has quietly emerged as one of the world’s most app-driven outdoor pursuits. Every year, hundreds of millions of bird observations are submitted to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird platform by regular…

A screen just cannot match the feeling of holding a large-format photography book. The weight of it. When a photograph is printed at scale, it makes you slow down. That’s precisely what Paul Nicklen’s Reverence, published by Hemeria and scheduled for release on July 28, which happens to be World Conservation Day, is. It reads more like a career in physical form than a coffee table book, compiling 160 photos from over thirty years of work in some of the world’s harshest environments. Only a few hundred miles from the North Pole, Nicklen was raised in an Inuit community. That…

Observing a sparrow make its way through Padre Faura Street’s cacophonous traffic is somewhat ironic. In Manila, the Eurasian tree sparrow thrives in areas where nearly all other species have vanished, bobbing along sidewalks and building their nests in gaps in signage. It’s not an example of success. The majority of urban planners appear happy to disregard this warning. In the past, Metro Manila truly was a garden city. Those who attended the former University of the Philippines campus in Ermita during the 1930s recalled the avenues lined with Poinciana and Acacia trees, as well as the June bird activity…

If you spend enough time in the vicinity of San Francisco Bay, you will eventually notice the quiet. Not quiet and serene. the alternative type. The kind that causes you to notice a gap in your surroundings. For those who have spent years walking those tidal marshes, that something is frequently a bird, or more accurately, the lack of many birds where there once were dozens. Morgan Tingley has devoted his professional life to closely observing precisely this type of absence. Tingley, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor, has focused a large portion of his work on figuring out why…

Over a degraded wetland, a certain silence descends. Not the tranquil kind, but rather the absence of something. You begin to understand what ecologists mean when they say the Everglades are broken when you stand at the edge of a sawgrass marsh in South Florida and watch a lone Great Blue Heron make its way across water that should be teeming with birds. There used to be so many wading birds in Florida, including Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks, White Ibises, and Great Egrets, that early naturalists referred to nesting colonies as “living storms of pink and white.” Early in the…

The stillness of standing at a woodland edge before dawn with binoculars raised, listening for something that might not come, is a type of silence that serious birdwatchers have always treasured. There is still that silence. Simply put, someone is probably unlocking a digital card for seeing a blue tit somewhere nearby right now. The UK-based app Birdex, which debuted earlier this year, does something surprisingly straightforward: it awards you points for each bird you see and record. Rare species are more profitable. For each one, you gather digital cards with illustrations. You can compete and add friends. Over 200,000…

Now, when wildlife veterinarians discuss H5N1, they describe a specific kind of dread. The fear of witnessing a coastline gradually go silent is more subdued than the terrifying, media-grabbing panic of a chicken barn outbreak. The sky has fewer shapes. fewer nests in use. There are fewer birds returning in the spring to locations they have visited for decades. Coastal raptors, such as ospreys, eagles, falcons, and sea-hunting hawks, are particularly affected by the silence that is building up along coastlines worldwide. These birds are at the top of their respective ecosystems and have no commercial value to protect them…

A small group of birdwatchers gathered at Caernarfon Harbour in north Wales in early June, their telescopes focused on a lone bird that was silently feeding among the moored boats. It was a western reef heron, a species that had never been seen in the UK before that weekend. It is situated between the Indian subcontinent and West Africa. It had no right to be in Wales. And yet there it was, completely unaffected by the commotion it had caused, picking its way through the shallows. It was an incredibly happy moment for birdwatchers. It was more complex for ecologists.…

There’s a good chance the barn is quieter than it should be if you walk by a commercial poultry farm in the Midwest of the United States right now. The birds have vanished, not because production has slowed. Culled. Millions of them were eliminated in order to prevent the spread of a virus that requires little stimulation. Since late 2020, the H5N1 strain of avian influenza has been spreading through domestic flocks and wild bird populations, expanding its reach in ways that most biosecurity planners weren’t fully anticipating five years ago. The figures are startling but not yet catastrophic. There…

Conservation scientists seldom discuss a certain type of frustration in public. It has nothing to do with money, the pressure to publish or perish, or the tedious process of peer review. It is the annoyance of knowing that important survey locations exist—islands teeming with resident and migratory waterbirds—but being unable to access them because fieldwork is practically impossible due to the political climate on the water. For researchers working anywhere close to the South China Sea, that is becoming more and more of a reality. The disputed island chains at the heart of this geopolitical standoff—the Spratly Islands, the Paracels,…