Tag: birds

This week, our editors recommend notable features and essays by Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Justin Heckert, Gloria Liu, Sharon Levy, and Mychal Denzel Smith.

“Undeniably, eBird … brings birders together and allows for rapid information sharing. It’s also created new—and sometimes contentious—etiquette and social dynamics.”

“Having spent thousands of hours preparing thousands upon thousands of specimens, Laybourne had accumulated a library’s worth of knowledge about birds.”

Fast food is killing the human world. Now it could be killing California gulls’ protected island habitat.

On the delightfully nerdy role of birds and bird calls in Game of Thrones.

How humanity eats the future to feed the present.

“I always say, If there is a $50,000 bill flying around, someone is going to try to catch it.”

At Smithsonian Magazine, Rachel E. Gross explores why keeping your pet cat inside is for the birds.

Karen Abbot remembers her beloved African gray parrot.

On birding as an extreme sport, and how observing birds satisfies a “bone-deep, soul-deep need to classify and organize the world around us.”

In this interview, author Kyo Maclear talks of birds and bird-watching as an “ode to the beauty of smallness, of quiet, of seeing the unique in the ordinary… in an age in which bombastic noise often triumphs over quiet contemplation.”

What happens when your chickens are killed by predators protected by law? At The New York Times Magazine, Wyatt Williams reports on the farming hardships posed by bald eagles and what one family farm in Bluffon, Georgia, is trying to do about it.

It’s not clear what the Audubon Society did to piss off Jonathan Franzen. But the Audubon that emerges from Franzen’s essay is a band of once-scrappy conservationists who have grown content to peddle squeaky plush toys and holiday cards; we’ve seized on climate change, apparently, in a last grab at relevance. In order to gin up […]