Audubon Magazine

The ghost orchid is one of the rarest and most mysterious flowers in North America. Until recently, scientists could only guess at how the 2,000 or so plants that cling to the trees in Florida’s remote old-growth swamp forests are pollinated—no one h

Audubon has shared a passion for birds with its members for decades, together creating lasting conservation change. The banning of DDT and the enactment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—the oldest and best bird law in the world—are both the result of

Splotchy and olive-brown, with a slight sheen to its shell, a contaminated Herring Gull egg on Lake Erie’s shores looks the same as any other. But under its delicate surface lies a host of toxins that could disrupt the young bird’s life before it beg

The Silent Majority This spring we published a series on female birders who’ve gone from being participants of the sport to transforming it. For birding to be truly inclusive, more women need to be in charge—and that’s a change we’re finally starting

FOR ELIZABETH HARGRAVE, IT doesn’t get much better than gathering with her husband and friends around a table for a good board game. But at one get-together in 2014, a question nagged her: Why do so many titles revolve around Mediterranean traders, m

To catch prized tuna and swordfish, fishing boats crisscross the world’s oceans casting miles-long lines with baited hooks into waters far offshore, an appealing lure to not only large fish but also seabirds looking for an easy meal. This practice, c

AS A CHILD JONATHAN HORST loved the Eastern Bluebird boxes on his grandparents’ farm. Though his family didn’t know it at the time, the foot-tall nesting homes, hosted in yards across the species’ range, would propel its comeback in the 1960s and ’70

The clouds had just cleared when the caravan pulled off Vantage Highway in Eastern Washington. As the survey team stepped out, backpacks and binoculars primed, a Sage Thrasher’s jumbled song rose up from the distant shrub-speckled hills. It was the f

BIRDS MAKE FASCINATING SUBJECTS, as the winners and honorable mentions of this year’s contest, our 10th, make clear. They’re at once beautiful and resilient, complex and comical. Thank you to the 2,253 entrants from all 50 states, Washington, D.C., a

WHEN WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST CARL Brown bailed out of his pickup at 11,000 feet one July day, high in the Beartooth Mountains of northwestern Wyoming, I hardly recognized him. He wore a helmet and carried an ice ax strapped to his backpack. Crampons, cams

Grasslands are tough. They can survive extremes, from heat waves and cold snaps to torrential downpours and droughts. They require turbulence. For millennia wildfires enhanced prairie soil and ensured grass’s dominance by burning back woody shrubs an

WE HAD COME THIS FAR AND NOW WE WERE STUCK, dug in on a dirt track high above the plains. It was monsoon season in Madagascar, and thunderstorms had laid waste to the deeply rutted road. Already we had traversed seemingly unnavigable passes on our wa

THE WOOD DUCK’S FLASHY FEATHERS REMINDED ILLUSTRATOR MELINDA BECK OF DESIGNS BY Emilio Pucci, the Italian fashionista known for kaleidoscopic patterns. Her bird, she decided, would showcase evolutionary couture. Dressed-up humans can dazzle, “but nat