Audubon Magazine

MOST DOCTORS IN TRAINING don’t begin a new semester expecting to learn about birds. But after her first year studying at Harvard Medical School, Lynn Hur was hooked. “It’s become one of my favorite activities,” she says. Hur came to the hobby courtes

AFTER BIRDING SEVERAL SPRING migrations on the East Coast, you might notice patterns. Species don’t show up in April and May all mixed up in an avian potpourri; instead, they tend to pass through in a predictable order year after year. No one knows t

THE NARROWS SURROUNDING Maine’s Hog Island have been populated with lobster boats and recreational craft for well over a century. But last autumn, a very different vessel appeared there: a 40-foot barge carrying several tons of timber, stone, and hyd

Happy Herping! This spring, consider expanding your ID skills beyond birds—by looking down, not up. Lizards, snakes, turtles, and their cold-blooded brethren are likewise all around us to observe and appreciate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many birders a

IN THE SMALL SEASIDE village of Basima, a hunter leans forward and taps a card showing an illustration of a bird. He’s seen that species, the Metallic Starling, known locally as Bune wiwi, here on Fergusson Island in eastern Papua New Guinea. Careful

SONGBIRD MIGRATION LOOKS different in the West. So say data from California’s Palomarin Field Station, operated since 1966 by the nonprofit Point Blue Conservation Science. The banding station, which records some 3,000 birds a year, is situated on th

Robert Armanini opened his birdseed store, Feed the Birds! in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, in 2010. He’d moved out of New York City 18 years prior, and a new home closer to nature sparked an interest in feeding wild birds, leading him to eventually st

IN LATE 2021, TUFTS UNIVERSITY virologist Wendy Puryear began to worry. The avian flu virus was behaving oddly. It usually passes through wild birds with little harm. But in Europe, a highly pathogenic strain known as H5N1 was killing a range of avia

One common birdseed ingredient is conspicuously capitalized and tagged with the registered trademark symbol: Nyjer, or Guizotia abyssinica. What gives? Nyjer, a small, thin seed highly popular with finches, first arrived at U.S. feeders in the early

PROFESSIONAL BIRD GUIDE Gabriel Lugo was looking forward to another busy season of tours when Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. The Category 4 storm—the fourth costliest on record to hit the United States—caused more tha

Added together, the swaths of sagebrush habitat that the West has lost since 2001 would cover half of Utah. This embattled ecosystem’s decline is an old story, but new evidence of the scale and pace of its destruction has conservationists questioning

ON A CHILLY, OVERCAST DECEMBER MORNING in North Texas, a car prowls a pitted dirt road. The occupants are straining forward, looking intently at the sky. “Kestrel!” says Maddy Kaleta from the passenger seat, pointing to a tiny black blob on a power l

THIS WILL BE A HISTORIC YEAR: 2023 will be remembered in Audubon’s story as the year we launched a new strategic direction, fully entered the global conservation arena, and positioned ourselves as an important conservation innovator for the decades a

AFTER MONTHS OF SOLITARY BIRDWATCHING EARLY IN THE PANDEMIC, ARTIST JER THORP jumped at an invitation to take part in the Christmas Bird Count (CBC), Audubon’s century-old annual survey. On a chilly day in December 2020, he and other Brooklyn CBC vol