Audubon Magazine

[Re: “Safety Net”] I wish you and all the wonderful people who are trying to save the Florida Grasshopper Sparrows much success. I wrote a poem 30 years ago to express my grief at the extinction of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow; whenever I’m reminded tha

ON THE NORTHERN FRINGE OF Belize City, narrow, congested streets simmer into a two-lane highway. Thirty-three miles and one left turn later, the road slips into the secluded community of Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, home to 1,387 people and 317 b

BACK IN 1874, IT WAS HARD To see the sun in Chicago. The city was rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871 by adding rows of new factories that belched so much smoke, people came home caked in a thin layer of black dust. Birds couldn’t escape either;

MORE THAN TWO YEARS AFTER President Trump boasted of his plans to build a “big, beautiful, powerful wall” between the United States and Mexico, his administration is adopting a stealthier approach—one that ducks dozens of environmental rules—to make

ASK HELEN JAMES ABOUT HER favorite birds, and she’ll give you a strange list of contenders: the ibis that noses through the island leaf litter, pretending it’s a kiwi; the duck with such bad eyesight it simply feels its way around; and the long-legge

ON A WINTER DAY DURING THE Revolutionary War, a flock of emerald-green parrots landed on a house in Schoharie, New York, convincing locals the apocalypse had arrived. (A year later, British troops invaded and burned down that exact building.) The bir

ON COOPER ISLAND, THERE AREN’t many rules. But one rule that is wordlessly respected is you never look directly at South Beach, because South Beach is the designated bathroom, sited on a gravel sandbar so flat you can take a head count of all inhabit

Every summer, Mandt’s Black Guillemots gather at Cooper Island to breed. A single pair—they mate for life—may produce about two dozen chicks during their 20-year lifetimes. But since 1990, the guillemots’ numbers have been dropping; fewer of those ch

TRUTH BE TOLD, VILANO BEACH MAY NOT BE long for this world. This popular stretch of Florida beach, which is just over the Francis and Mary Usina Bridge from St. Augustine on the Atlantic Coast, is located on a barrier island, which is to say it’s par

FOR DECADES TONY AMOS WAS as familiar a sight on the beaches of Texas’s Mustang Island as the wildlife he surveyed. Tall with flowing white hair and beard, Amos had traversed a seven-mile stretch of beach every other day since 1978, recording everyth

The Village of Thua Luu, in the central Vietnamese province of Thua Thien-Hue, is tucked into the narrow coastal strip between the Annamite Mountains and the South China Sea. Just behind the railroad tracks is an imposing French Catholic church with

For more Bald Eagle tips and hotspots, go to audubon.org/photography. FIFTY YEARS AGO, IF YOU WANTED TO SEE OUR NATIONAL SYMBOL in the flesh (or feather), you’d have been searching for a long time: By the 1960s, just 487 breeding pairs of Bald Eagles