Author: Frances Monroe

A homeowner in San Antonio shared a picture to a Facebook group dedicated to bird watching in 2023. The picture was grainy because it was taken through a backyard window, but there was something wrong with the bird right away. Its striking blue coloring was typical of a blue jay, but its heavy, black-patterned, nearly mask-like facial markings gave the impression that they belonged to something completely different. When Brian Stokes, a PhD candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas, saw the picture, he was genuinely intrigued. There was a problem. When the bird was…

The way avian influenza spreads is unsettling. Not in the dramatic, obvious way that people envision: a farm that is obviously in crisis, panicked birds, and obvious illness. The virus usually spreads silently. on a delivery truck’s tread. on a boot’s sole. on the wheel of a feed cart that passed through one shed after another, carrying everything hazardous but nothing visible. This type of transmission is known as “fomite spread,” where “fomites” refers to any surface or object that has the potential to harbor and spread an infectious organism. Although this idea is not new, it is still undervalued…

Every wildlife photographer is familiar with the moment when a kingfisher lands thirty meters away, remains motionless for roughly four seconds, and then disappears. Depending almost entirely on the type of glass you are holding, you may or may not return home with anything usable. The solution to that issue was costly, bulky, and taxing to transport for the majority of the previous few decades. Calculus is changing. Additionally, it’s changing more quickly than most photographers anticipated. Super-telephoto lenses, or anything larger than 400mm, have historically been associated with a particular type of shooter: the professional with a monopod, a…

You’ll notice a difference in the windows when you stroll through any newly finished mixed-use development in a mid-sized American city. Yes, they appear cleaner, but there’s more to them—a subtle etching, a particular tint, or a nearly undetectable layering that wasn’t common even five years ago. Most people are unaware of it. Developers take note. Their project accountants are undoubtedly aware. The built environment has always been influenced by urban planning regulations in ways that the general public hardly ever notices. However, the movement to require safe glazing standards in new construction is one of those changes that begins…

Every spring, a swift returns from sub-Saharan Africa somewhere over a row of terrace houses in England. It has been flying nonstop for nine months, sleeping, eating, and hardly stopping. Now, all it wants is the tiny, dark opening beneath the roofline that it used last year, the year before that, and possibly even ten years earlier. However, that gap is closing more and more. filled in. covered with insulation. completely sealed so that no heat, no air, and most definitely no swift can get through. This is not a tale of intentional devastation. There was no intention to drive…

Watching a mallard paddle silently across a city pond with bread crusts floating nearby, pigeons crowding the bank, and kids pointing from the edge is unsettling. It appears to be quite typical. This is precisely why it is so simple to overlook the spread of avian influenza through urban parks until it is discovered. This past winter, scientists and wildlife rehabilitators in New York City reported a sharp increase in suspected H5N1 cases among urban bird populations. Raptors, gulls, and waterfowl are among the creatures that coexist with millions of people on a daily basis. There was no distant wetland…

The picture of a well-meaning dog owner rubbing a tiny pipette of liquid into the fur at the back of their pet’s neck is unsettling. After that, they cleaned their hands. Then, without realizing it, wasting a dose of one of the world’s most effective insecticides. Simply put, that is what has been going on for years throughout the United Kingdom. And it’s getting harder to ignore the evidence of where it ends up. Researchers at the University of Sussex tested feather samples from five common garden bird species: blackbirds, blue tits, chaffinches, dunnocks, and goldfinches. The study was published…

If you’ve ever seen an oriole move around on a branch in the morning light, there’s a moment when its plumage appears to completely change color. Orange turns into gold before becoming nearly amber in hue. It’s not a trick of fatigued eyes. It’s physics, and for the better part of the past ten years, physics has been subtly drawing scientists further into an issue that turns out to be far more difficult than it first appears. Pigment is not the source of iridescence, the characteristic that causes some bird feathers to change color depending on the viewing angle. It…

When you hear it for the first time, it seems almost ridiculous. A $320 million federal construction project is put on hold by a woodpecker, a bird that weighs less than a coffee mug. No congressional vote, no protest march. Just a judge, a federal lawsuit, and a creature that no one had definitively established was still alive at the time of the ruling. In 2006, a federal judge in Arkansas temporarily halted the Grand Prairie Irrigation Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers due to concerns about the ivory-billed woodpecker, a species that most ornithologists had already declared…

For a long time, “sharp” was the only adjective that seemed to matter when it came to wildlife photography. Kingfishers have sharp feathers. A snow leopard with keen eyes. Technically flawless, crisp, sharp, and yet somewhat hollow. At least among photographers who have been doing this long enough to grow weary of perfection, there is a growing perception that something significant was consistently absent from that fixation. The shift hasn’t been particularly loud, but it has been slow. It has no manifesto. However, if you spend enough time observing what wildlife photographers are producing these days—the swirling backgrounds, the painterly…