Author: Frances Monroe

In cities, migratory birds are often dismissed with a flick of the eye, a shrug, or even mild annoyance if one approaches too closely. David Lindo has worked against that instinct for the better part of twenty years. The British ornithologist who goes by the moniker “Urban Birder” has made a career out of the surprisingly straightforward claim that it is worthwhile to pay attention to the birds flying over your head downtown. that the sky above any city, including Windsor-Essex, is not empty. It simply goes unnoticed. Growing up in northwest London without access to the countryside or a…

When you’ve finally reached a location you’ve wanted to visit for years and it looks exactly like an airport gate in August, a certain kind of frustration sets in. Hot and packed. Exorbitant. Millions of travelers are experiencing this emotion, which is subtly changing how people organize their vacations. Traveling during shoulder season, which falls between the busiest summer months and the quiet off-season, is no longer a specialty option for retirees and those on a tight budget. Shoulder season reservations increased 20% over 2024, according to booking data from Advantage Travel Partnership. In contrast, summer reservations increased by just…

In a peaceful suburb of Chicago, there is a yard that appears somewhat untamed at first. clusters of milkweed close to the fence line. Slightly off-center is a small birdbath. A bee, a monarch, or a sparrow searching the leaf litter for something are all constantly in motion. Neighbors ask the homeowner questions. To explain herself, she received a sign. And for some reason, that sign seems to represent something more significant that is subtly taking place throughout suburban America. Native plant societies have been arguing for decades that the well-kept, cherished, and billion-dollar-maintained American lawn is essentially dead space.…

The idea that entire bird species that once inhabited Hawaii’s skies—birds that sang, nested, competed, and evolved over millions of years—simply vanished before anyone thought to write them down is subtly unsettling. No pictures. No eyewitness reports. Only bones, waiting in the volcanic sediment. They were discovered by Helen James. For the better part of forty years, James, a paleontologist and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has been extracting answers from the earth, sometimes literally. She can be seen headlamp on as she descends into dormant Hawaiian volcanoes in footage that the Smithsonian…

A fuzzy photo uploaded to a Facebook group for birdwatchers was the beginning of it. It’s likely that the woman who snapped it was unaware of what she was seeing. The majority of those who scrolled past it didn’t either. However, in May 2023, Brian Stokes, a doctoral student studying green jays at the University of Texas at Austin, noticed something in that picture. In a way, the bird in the picture was blue. It had a black mask, a white chest, and the posture of a blue jay. But something was off. The proportions weren’t quite correct. The markings…

Beneath years of research on British accents is a small but revealing detail: the word “spelk.” It is still used in Newcastle and Sunderland to refer to a tiny piece of wood lodged beneath the skin, which is what the rest of England would refer to as a splinter. The word has essentially disappeared everywhere else. Researchers at Cambridge have been paying extremely close attention because it’s the kind of thing you would completely miss if you weren’t paying close attention. Through its work in phonetics and applied linguistics, the Cambridge Sound Lab has spent years mapping how people in…

Ornithologist Simon Hugheston-Roberts was walking the shoreline at Y Foryd, a tidal bay close to Caernarfon in North Wales, on a calm Saturday morning in early June. He was carrying out the kind of routine bird count that most people never give much thought to. Then he noticed something. A tiny, black heron. Low above the coast. Moving in a way that was a little strange, a little strange. He came to a halt. looked more closely. Silently, he realized that what he was witnessing had never been documented in Britain. About three hundred people had reached Caernarfon by the…

In rural America, there once was a sound that characterized summer mornings. Something older than the creak of a barn door or the rumble of a tractor. From somewhere in the tall grass came a bright, descending whistle. The meadowlark of the East. Perched on a fencepost at the edge of a hay field with its head thrown back and its yellow chest blazing against the pale morning sky, you would hear it before you saw it. It’s becoming more difficult to locate that sound. Eastern Meadowlark populations decreased by about 75% between 1966 and 2019. It’s not a rounding…

It has an almost poetic quality. Two feathers, each about the size of a paper clip, are removed from a bird’s wing when it lands in a mist net. Within days, these feathers can reveal to scientists which population the bird originated from, which climate it adapted to, and whether its chromosomes are aging more quickly than they should. It sounds like science fiction. More and more, it’s just science. A partnership based on decades of feather collection throughout the Western Hemisphere, the Bird Genoscape Project has been quietly accomplishing something amazing. Researchers can now create complete genome maps for…

In the American interior, there is a proposed highway that would cut commute times in half, reroute freight traffic, and reduce accidents on a dilapidated two-lane that has been “temporary” for forty years. However, construction has stalled for reasons other than money, politics, or even public opposition. A nest has caused it to stall. Not a nest of metaphors. A real one, constructed by a species of protected bird, situated in the exact wrong scrub patch along the intended corridor. A stop is mandated by federal law. So the dozers do nothing. It sounds almost comical until you consider how…