Audubon Magazine

Camouflaged, nocturnal, and elusive, nightjars are some of the least-studied birds on the continent. Surveys suggest that many species in the family, including the Eastern Whip-poor-will, are in sharp decline, and researchers in the Midwest want to u

AS SUMMER WINDS DOWN AND many of the birds that breed in the Arctic and across North America are beginning their journeys south into the Caribbean and Latin America, I have been thinking about how our hemispheric approach to bird conservation—one of

Unseen Danger Each year, up to a billion migrating birds are killed across North America after colliding with buildings and windows along their journeys. To document this tragedy and solutions that can help prevent it, this past spring our team embed

PLASTIC POLLUTION Wasn’t discovered floating mid-ocean, far from any shore, until 1971. Today it’s ubiquitous in the lives of seabirds and other marine life. “There isn’t really anywhere left in the ocean that doesn’t have plastic that these birds ca

IT’S AN OLD JOKE IN THE WEST that BLM stands for “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.” In reality, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s mandate is far more expansive. It’s charged with overseeing one-tenth of the nation’s land while balancing competing u

GOLDEN EAGLES DON’T SEEM likely to become roadkill: They spend their days soaring over the American West’s lightly populated sagebrush sea, not scurrying through traffic. Yet eagles often descend to scavenge carcasses along highways, where they may b

EARLIER THIS YEAR, A DOZEN volunteers and staff armed with trowels kicked off an urgent experiment in cactus conservation. On a clear March morning they spread out within the high-quality habitat of the Tucson Audubon’s Mason Center, pushing wheelbar

The egg posed a problem. Biologist Shawn Farry and his crew had spent much of March and April collecting sick and dying California Condors from the red rock landscape of northern Arizona, including a bird officially known as 316. The 20-year-old fema

CARMELLA STIRRAT KNOWS how to burn a forest. She’s done it dozens of times—often enough that at a prescribed fire in April, she was certain she had time for a rescue mission. She was worried about a particular longleaf pine tree amid thousands of oth

ON MAY 11, 2018, ANDREW FARNSWORTH saw something that was almost unbelievable. A migration ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Farnsworth has seen more than his fair share of rare birds. But there was one species native to the Lower 48 that

IVAN TYMOFEIEV MISSED HIS family in western Ukraine. He’d been working for a large German conservation nonprofit in Berlin and decided it was time for a trip to see his mother in his hometown of Uzhhorod. He also planned a work-related detour: a visi

LIKE THE BIRDS SHE RECENTLY GOT into watching, Alexis Nikole Nelson sees tasty food everywhere she looks. “I think it’s so exciting that we have all of these flavors hiding in your front yard, a local park, a local woodland,” says Nelson, known as “B

SANDHILL CRANES ARE GATEWAY birds: Encountering their impressive size, elegant movements, and prehistoric croaking calls can turn any casual observer into a fullfledged birder. What’s more, their multitudes at migration stopover sites are almost over

Remmel long to realize that to find more birds, it helps to know about native plants. So in 2022 Remmel signed up for the Arkansas Master Naturalist program and, sure enough, its botany and ecology courses made their birding more fruitful. What Remme

THERE’S SOMETHING MAGICAL about holding binoculars to your eyes and seeing a faraway object appear within reach—especially for children. Many bins marketed toward kids, though, are more like toys than tools. Youngsters past preschool age are generall

Where did you fly and what did you see? Fill in the blanks or write your own message—we’d love to see it! Are you a teacher? Go to audubonadventures.org/explorer for more resources. FOR MANY PEOPLE, SUMMER means travel season. But humans aren’t the o

AFTER COLLEGE, KIRSTEN FURLONG DEVELOPED A DEEP INTEREST IN BIRDS WHILE WORKING IN a wildlife photographer’s gallery. The Boise, Idaho, resident’s current obsession is the Bobolink, a songbird whose numbers have plummeted in step with the loss of pra