Author: Frances Monroe

You can convince yourself that the bird in one of Carolyn Monastra’s photos is real. The glacial lake shimmers blue-green in the distance, the Pine Grosbeak perches on its branch, and the light has a certain morning quality that is hard to replicate. Then something changes. A bit too clean of an edge. A silence that transcends endurance. It dawns on you that you are staring at a paper cutout, a replica set in a setting where the real bird might eventually vanish. That is the Divergence of Birds project’s entire architecture, and it functions precisely because it doesn’t make…

One of the most biodiverse corridors remaining in Southeast Asia is protected by the Sierra Madre mountain range, which stretches like a spine down the eastern edge of Luzon. Its old-growth canopy is where hornbills build their nests. Its rivers are home to rare freshwater fish. For generations, indigenous Agta communities have inhabited those waterways, drawing sustenance and significance from the environment in ways that no infrastructure plan has ever adequately taken into consideration. Additionally, it is a location where conservation lawyers and development interests are increasingly circling each other with genuine urgency. Geronimo Piquero has lived in that tension…

For twenty years, wildlife photography was characterized by a certain sound. The swift, decisive, and distinctly real mechanical clap of a mirror rising inside a DSLR body. Long waits on riverbanks, innumerable mornings spent in chilly hides, and the momentary choices that distinguish a good frame from an exceptional one were all accompanied by it. Now that something truly better has emerged to replace it, that sound is fading, not because it failed anyone. In wildlife photography, the transition from DSLR to mirrorless cameras was gradual and most definitely not the result of advertising campaigns. It occurred as a result…

When conducting research, there’s a moment that makes you stop cold. The kind where a scientist looks at a GPS track on a screen and says, aloud, to no one in particular, “That can’t be right.” This is not the kind that immediately makes headlines. That’s essentially what happened when a Swansea University team observed streaked shearwaters, which are tiny, graceful seabirds weighing only 580 grams, fly straight into a typhoon’s eye. Not away from it. In its direction. After eleven years of tagging adult shearwaters in the Sea of Japan, one of the world’s most cyclone-prone areas of open…

Early in the morning on Echo Lake, there’s a certain silence that feels off. The other kind, not the serene, pre-dawn kind. The kind you see when something that was once present just isn’t there anymore. The lack of a loon’s cry cuts in a way that is difficult to describe for anyone who has paddled these waters on Mount Desert Island in previous summers. For as long as people can remember, the lakes in Acadia National Park have been home to the common loon. In search of fish, pairs return to the same areas every spring, carrying their young…

Some of the best scientific instruments are constructed with a certain irony. Millions of common people pointing their phones at butterflies, backyard mushrooms, and the odd bewildered weasel stuck in a toilet—not in labs, not through grants, not through committees. With iNaturalist, which currently has over 300 million observations from over 4 million users worldwide, that is essentially what happened. It was not intended to become the most extensive biodiversity tracking system in the United States. It simply did. Pausing on that number is worthwhile. 300 million observations. That amount of field data could not have been collected in a…

A tiny brown bird sits on a stick as if nothing had changed, barely perceptible against Southern California’s parched riverbed brush. However, something has. For over a century, a subtle change has been taking place deep within that bird, within the very code that defines it. Only now are scientists learning to read it. Researchers’ long-held suspicion that environmental stress affects more than just an animal’s behavior or movement has been confirmed by two recent studies on bird populations in California. At the molecular level, it alters their identity. It turns out that traits are not the only things that…

A candy bar wrapper advertising the 1994 FIFA World Cup is among the items in a nest that is situated beneath a dock on Amsterdam’s Rokin Canal. Above that, about fifteen COVID-19 face masks, plastic condom packaging, and McDonald’s sandwich wrappers are layered in like sediment. The most recent addition is a protein bar wrapper at the top, most likely from the previous year. This was constructed by a bird. Actually, a number of birds. Common coots unintentionally created what biologists now refer to as a stratigraphic record of human waste over the course of three decades by piling plastic…

When a bird appears somewhere it has no right to be, the birding community experiences a certain kind of excitement. A Maine coastal Siberian thrush. A Steller’s Sea-Eagle, which has a wingspan of up to eight feet and is native to Russia and Japan, is straying through Alaska before descending into the lower 48. Something changes when word spreads. People begin looking up the cost of flights. Small towns experience a sudden shortage of hotel rooms. On weekends, gas stations receive more customers than they do in a normal month. Most people outside of the birding community are unaware of…

Before you can identify it, something feels a little strange when you drive through central Illinois in early June. With corn everywhere, no weeds, no wild edges, and hardly a fence post, the fields are incredibly neat. It appears to be productive. Effective. Nearly surgical. However, when you exit the vehicle and remain motionless for a minute, you are struck by the silence. Not quiet and serene. Quiet and empty. There is now a number for that absence. North America has lost about three billion birds since 1970. Additionally, a study that was published earlier this year in the journal…