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BirdNote

Escape the daily grind and immerse yourself in the natural world. Rich in imagery, sound, and information, BirdNote inspires you to notice the world around you. Join us for daily two-minute stories about birds, the environment, and more.

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The First North American Wildlife Refuge

BirdNote ·

2025/10/04

In the center of Oakland, California, is Lake Merritt. People row in it, picnic and jog around it, and it's a place of respite within the city. And it hosts waterbirds such as ducks, geese, egrets, pelicans, cormorants, and coots. A beautifully illustrated field guide by Alex Harris, Birds of Lake

Waterfowl heritage with Kelsey Leonard

BirdNote ·

2025/10/03

Kelsey Leonard is a leading scholar in Indigenous water governance, climate justice, and Earth law. In the latest season of Bring Birds Back, Kelsey explores the storied relationship between Indigenous people, wetlands, and birds. Kelsey says waterfowl hunters have helped to document that natural

Júlia d’Oliveira on Recreating Extinct Animals

BirdNote ·

2025/10/02

Júlia d’Oliveira is a paleoartist who brings extinct species to life in artwork. For each species she illustrates, she learns everything she can about the species to come up with a realistic portrait. Júlia hopes her paleoart offers something different from the grotesque versions of dinosaurs in

Snowy Albatross Molt

BirdNote ·

2025/10/01

Most birds molt and regrow their flight or wing feathers — one at a time along each wing — to stay in prime condition for flying. But for a Wandering Albatross, with a whopping 10-to-12-foot wingspan, that’s a big job! It takes the large albatrosses a full year to molt, and they have to put off

La muda del albatros viajero

BirdNote ·

2025/09/30

La mayoría de las aves mudan y regeneran sus plumas de vuelo, una a la vez en cada ala, para mantenerse en óptimas condiciones para volar. Pero para el albatros viajero ( Diomedea exulans), que tiene una impresionante envergadura de entre 3 y 4 metros, ¡es un gran desafío! A los albatros más grandes

Spark Bird: Birding from the Bus

BirdNote ·

2025/09/29

Kelsen Caldwell drives a bus in and around Seattle for King County Metro. As a bus driver, sometimes there’s downtime if your bus is moving too fast. What do you do with all that extra time? If you’re Kelsen, you fall in love with birds.

Chickadee Line-up

BirdNote ·

2025/09/28

Chickadees are tiny songbirds named for their characteristic song and there are seven species found in North America. You'll find the Black-capped Chickadee across the northern US into Canada. The Carolina Chickadee holds sway in the Southeast. Hear the husky voice of a Mountain Chickadee in the

Sapsuckers

BirdNote ·

2025/09/27

Sapsuckers drill small holes in the bark of favored trees, then return again and again to eat the sap that flows out. And hummingbirds, kinglets, and warblers come to the sap wells to eat the insects trapped in the sap. Although a sapsucker, like the Red-breasted Sapsucker pictured above, may suck a

An Ever-Growing Library of Bird Sounds

BirdNote ·

2025/09/26

Most of the bird sounds you hear on BirdNote come from the Macaulay Library, a vast collection of over one million bird calls and songs curated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. The library relies on both professional field recordists and dedicated volunteers to capture the sounds of birds all over

Moon-Watching for Migrating Birds

BirdNote ·

2025/09/25

Before the high-tech gadgets used to track bird migration today, there was moon-watching: a technique dreamed up in the 1940s by ornithologist George Lowery. Using telescopes pointed at the moon to see the silhouettes of migratory birds, Lowery helped show that birds regularly migrate across the

How Jays Helped Restore an Oak Forest

BirdNote ·

2025/09/24

Corvids, like crows and jays, are known for caching seeds instead of eating them immediately. Sometimes, those seeds take root before the birds return. Mario Pesendorfer, a forest and behavioral ecologist at BOKU in Vienna, says that’s what happened on Santa Cruz Island in southern California. It’s

Colorín Azul, Navegante de las Estrellas

BirdNote ·

2025/09/23

Las estrellas parecen girar en el cielo, lo que plantea una gran pregunta: ¿cómo logran las aves usarlas para orientarse durante la migración? El ornitólogo Stephen Emlen llevó azulillos índigo ( Passerina cyanea), también llamados colorines azules, a un planetario y observó sus movimientos mientras

Lee Ann Roripaugh: Utsuroi

BirdNote ·

2025/09/22

Today is the Autumnal Equinox, when the sun crosses the equator and day and night are of approximately equal length across the globe. In her poem ‘Utsuroi’, writer Lee Ann Roripaugh reflects on how, as the days grow shorter, the remaining light feels that much more beautiful.

Southern Lapwings Defend Their Nest

BirdNote ·

2025/09/21

Nature educator Johanne Ryan shares her observations of Southern Lapwings, shorebirds that make their nests on the ground in open areas and vigorously defend them. If a potential predator approaches, the parent will sound a piercing alarm call. If that doesn’t work, the lapwing will charge the

T and Dart

BirdNote ·

2025/09/20

Author Kira Jane Buxton loves crows — so much that she’s written two novels about a crow named S.T. navigating the extinction of humanity. When she was writing those books, she tried befriending the crows in her neighborhood and wound up bonding with a pair of them. She named them T and Dart. T, the

Williamson's Sapsucker

BirdNote ·

2025/09/19

Williamson's Sapsuckers nest in western mountain forests. The radically different plumages of the male and female so confounded 19th-century naturalists that, for nearly a decade, the birds were thought to be of different species. Sapsuckers are unique among woodpeckers in drilling neat rows of tiny

A Lost Hummingbird is Found Again

BirdNote ·

2025/09/18

The Santa Marta Sabrewing is a hummingbird species so rare, they’ve only been documented twice in recent years. Native to the mountains of Colombia, they were officially described in 1946. No one reported another sighting until 2010. They became a “lost” species, eluding every attempt to find them

Thick-billed Euphonia – Deceitful Mimic

BirdNote ·

2025/09/17

Northern Mockingbirds can learn to mimic the sounds of just about any bird. They mimic to show off, not to deceive. But this Thick-billed Euphonia, a tiny songbird in South America, employs what scientists call “deceitful mimicry.” When frightened by a predator near its nest, a Thick-billed Euphonia

Migración y grasa

BirdNote ·

2025/09/16

Si los vuelos migratorios de larga distancia ya son asombrosos, lo que ocurre dentro del cuerpo de un ave durante esos vuelos parece, sencillamente, increíble. Para almacenar grasa, muchas aves comen hasta tres veces más de lo normal y buscan alimento durante muchas más horas, mientras se preparan

The Delightfully Odd Magellanic Plover

BirdNote ·

2025/09/15

The Magellanic Plover is known for being a bit of an oddball. These shorebirds have a round body like a dove and even feed their young with milk produced in a part of their digestive system called the crop — a rare trait they share with doves. But genetic data revealed that Magellanic Plovers are

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