Author: Frances Monroe

If you’ve ever found yourself sitting alone on a mountain trail far from the closest road or deep in a forest before dawn, there’s a moment when you can practically feel the absence of mechanical sound. It lands on your shoulders. Your breathing is altered by it. Then, as you begin to settle into it, the moment ends when a plane flies across the sky above the treeline or a far-off highway hums back into range. It’s getting more difficult to avoid that experience—reaching for silence only to have it elude you—and to write it off as a small annoyance.…

You will hear them before you see them if you stroll through any mid-sized city on a warm afternoon. Near a café table, house sparrows quarrel over a dropped sandwich. With the composed efficiency of experts, two crows examine a split-open trash bag. A rock pigeon landing on the roof of a bus shelter, gazing down at the street with a mildly indifferent expression. These birds don’t have picture-perfect beauty. They are not uncommon. However, it is becoming more and more obvious that they might be among the most ecologically successful animals on the planet at the moment. This is…

A bird and a commercial aircraft occupy the same area of the sky for a brief moment. The majority of passengers are unaware that it occurred. Somewhere along the fuselage, the pilots may hear a dull thump or feel a slight shudder. However, the result could be disastrous if that collision involves a jet engine during takeoff. That moment has already occurred 51 times at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in just the first half of 2026. In 2025, 953 bird strike incidents were reported in the Philippines. Just the first half of 2026 saw an additional 250. During a Senate…

Some forms of professional humiliation are subtle. It usually appears covertly during a field session when the subject is uncooperative, the light is off, and the mud near the riverbank is just damp enough to be dangerous. For the majority of stories that eventually make people laugh, that’s about how it starts. Not right now. Never at that precise moment. The term “accidental comedy” is used loosely on the internet, where anything that takes someone by surprise is considered hilarious. However, in the realm of visual storytelling, such as photography, documentaries, and field journalism, a single unplanned moment, a misplaced…

There is a specific type of grief that has no common name. It tends to live in silence on family farms where livestock disease has forced a cull, existing somewhere between financial ruin and personal failure. The animals have vanished. The barns have been sanitized. The documentation has been submitted. The farmer is still standing in the yard, unsure of what to do. The psychological harm caused by a culling event goes far beyond what the economic impact reports ever capture, according to researchers who study agricultural mental health. Farmers, veterinarians, and industry workers encounter five different challenges during and…

Seeing a long-held belief subtly crumble under the weight of evidence brings a certain kind of satisfaction. The wildlife photography community upheld a fairly strict hierarchy for years, with full-frame at the top and everything else being tolerated. Smaller sensors, smaller bodies, and smaller lenses made up Micro Four Thirds systems, which were thought to be more appropriate for novice or travel snappers than for serious practitioners tracking raptors across open ridge lines or chasing kingfishers at dawn. That view is getting very old. When you spend actual time at a mountain trailhead or wetland reserve, where photographers congregate before…

A record of nearly 4,300 years of environmental history can be found deep within a cave in northwest Jamaica, hidden beneath layers of brown paste that most people would quickly leave. About 5,000 bats, who have been feeding, roosting, and leaving their waste on the same cave floor since the early Bronze Age, are the authors of that record. A seemingly insignificant fact turns out to be something much more important. Scientists are starting to understand that these accumulated layers of guano may provide answers to issues that no satellite, sensor, or climate model has been able to fully address,…

The way avian influenza spreads is almost unpredictable. When a common teal lifts off a Siberian wetland, no alarm goes off. For a flock of grey herons traveling south through Central Asia, there is no border check. The birds follow ancient routes that have been shaped over thousands of years, going where they have always gone. And the virus moves with them somewhere along the way, either discreetly shed into the water below or tucked away inside a respiratory tract. That is the main issue that scientists and veterinarians are currently facing: a disease crisis that is caused by the…

The scale strikes you before anything else when you stand on the edge of practically any wind farm on a clear Wyoming morning. The turbines are massive, standing 100 meters tall, with blades that spin at a speed of about 170 miles per hour. A lone golden eagle riding a thermal appears nearly insignificant against that background. It isn’t. In North America alone, wind turbines are thought to kill between 140,000 and 328,000 birds annually. Golden eagles, bald eagles, and other protected raptors are among those killed; it took decades of conservation work to bring these birds back from the…

When most people see a certain picture for the first time, it stops them cold. A photographer using only a dim handheld spotlight and a camera set to maximum sensitivity managed to capture two aardvarks, nose to nose in the Botswana night, mid-greeting. Not a flash. No artificial flood lighting. What was previously thought to be physically impossible can now be accomplished with just a high ISO setting. That picture was captured in 2014 by wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas. It appears to have been lit by a larger, more intentional source than it actually was. A quiet revolution in nocturnal…