Author: Frances Monroe

When wildlife photographers discuss how they discovered the lens they truly trust, they typically do so without being asked. It happened at the edge of a forest during the deer rut, one of those dim autumn mornings when the mist sits in the hollows and a stag moves thru the treeline about as quietly as something that big can manage, according to Darren Spoonley, a wilderness documentarian who primarily works out of Ireland. With the Sigma 150-600mm close enough to fill the frame, he was far enough back to be safe. The animal’s distinct pair of eyes during the rut,…

For a city that hardly ever stops acting, lower Manhattan performs something unique every September. The Tribute in Light, which consists of the two massive blue beams ascending from the World Trade Center site, is turned off for a few hours. Not because the memorial has ended, but rather because thousands of migratory birds have become stuck inside the light columns and are circling around in clear anguish until the beams darken and the birds disperse back into the nite sky. Most years, it occurs. Quietly, it has evolved into one of the more bizarre fall customs in New York.…

A certain type of poetry, in which a nightingale sings in an imagined English hedgerow and a robin hoops across frost that no Filipino reader has ever actually touched, used to predominate English-language literature classes throughout the Philippines. That was really how nature poetry sounded for eons. imported in bulk, taught sincerely, and mainly unaware of what was going on outside the window. There has been a change, but it has been so subtle that most readers outside of literary circles may not have noticed. The Philippine eagle soaring over the remnants of Mindanao’s old-growth forest, swiftlets threading thru limestone…

You can hear a great tit or house sparrow singing away from a lamppost or a scraggly street tree at seven in the morning if you’re standing close to a busy intersection in almost any major city. Its voice is noticeably higher than you’d expect from the same bird in the countryside. It’s simple to pass by without realizing it. But it’s difficult to unhear once you know to listen for it. This trend has been documented for years by researchers, and when you think about it, the explanation is quite simple. The low-frequency range is primarily occupied by city…

Outside of a small, inconspicuous town in the American Midwest, there is a reservoir that is now home to several acres of dark blue panels that are slightly angled toward the sun. It resembles an odd floating parking lot when viewed from a distance. However, something different is taking place up close. Between the rows, coots paddle. Near the anchor wires, a great blue heron remains still, waiting for any fish that might be disturbed by the shade. Strangely enough, that picture sums up the majority of the current discussion over floating solar. Over the past ten years, the technology…

You’ll hear them before you see them if you go in Kensington Gardens on a gloomy February morning. A ragged, chattering shriek will cut thru the plane trees, followed by a flash of green arrowing overhead. For many years, ring-necked parakeets have been a feature of London’s skyline. How they got here is a mystery to everyone. The common narrative is that Jimi Hendrix released a pair on Carnaby Street in the 1960s, although most ornithologists regard that as lovely fiction rather than fact. The fact that these birds have become so polarizing is not absurd. Parts of the shooting…

A juvenile hen harrier’s satellite tag goes silent every spring somewhere on a heather-covered hillside in northern England or the Scottish uplands. No signal, no last known coordinates that veered off onto a road or a lake. Nothing at all. Tracking these birds has led conservationists to identify the pattern. Seldom does it indicate that the tag broke. The moors themselves are stunning, almost theatrically so; they are rolling, purple-brown, and littered with Land Rover paths that twist up toward the horizon and grouse butts. It’s understandable why shooting there costs tens of thousands of pounds per day. The argument…

Ornithologists started observing something that seemed almost too bizarre to be true in the middle of the 1960s. The weight of the parent bird incubating the eggs caused the eggs laid by peregrine falcons on nesting cliffs in the eastern United States to collapse. The shells were just too thin to support. In areas where the falcons had historically flourished, populations were drastically declining and nesting efforts were failing at previously unheard-of rates. The mechanism was traced back to DDT, a pesticide that was sprayed on suburban communities and agricultural land with what now seems to be incredible confidence in…

A researcher on a routine survey route discovered hundreds of dead birds on the ground on a January morning in the Australian outback—not the picturesque red-rock version from vacation advertising, but the flat, shrubby, unrelentingly hot interior. Finches with zebras. Budgerigars. Some little honeyeaters. It was 48 degrees Celsius in the air the day before. Neither sickness nor predators have affected the birds. They died because they had simply lost the ability to chill themselves. After making a note of the places and gathering samples, the researcher submitted a report. It was not the first recorded incident of its kind…

Early in the morning, a researcher places a mist net between two trees and waits somewhere deep enough in the Brazilian Amazon that the closest road is hours away. The vibrant, eye-catching species that show up in wildlife documentaries are not the birds that fly into it. Antbirds, woodcreepers, and tiny flycatchers are examples of small, brown, understory birds that live their whole lives within a few hundred meters of their hatching site. They are not interested in migrating. This area of forest is familiar to them. And a Louisiana State University crew has been catching them, weighing them, measuring…