No human dreams of relaxing on the shores of Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean that’s best known as a Soviet testing site for nuclear weapons. Yet a growing flock of Pink-footed Geese have begun to make this militarized zone their summer home. Though this region was once too cold for

It might sound strange, but dirt helps birds scrub themselves clean. Birds of all sizes, like the Eurasian Skylark pictured here, often scrape a depression in the ground and flick dirt onto their bodies, shimmying to shake it off. Experiments showed that birds use dust to prevent oils from building

Bandadas de cotorros cabeza roja ( Psittacara erythrogenys), una especie nativa de América del Sur, ahora pueden verse por todo San Francisco. Aunque una leyenda urbana afirma que la dueña de una tienda de mascotas las introdujo al incendiar su tienda, es más probable que algunas de estas aves

Every summer, millions of birds flock to the Arctic Circle to find mates and raise their young. In a study published in 2025, paleontologists found evidence of the earliest known Arctic breeding colony from fossils uncovered in northern Alaska. The site dates back nearly 73 million years when many

In temperate climates like North America, it’s often male songbirds that sing the most. Typically the males migrate north before females and establish territories for the short breeding season, using their songs as a way to claim a spot. But many female birds do sing, even in colder climates (like

If a bird’s feathers get too dried out, they become brittle. To prevent that from happening, most birds have a gland located above the base of the tail that produces oil. They use their beaks to massage oil from the gland into their feathers to keep them supple. A bird first grips a feather in its

Birds’ four-chambered hearts run larger than those of mammals, relative to body size, and they are coupled with extremely efficient cardiovascular systems. The energy demands of flight require these adaptations. An exercising human has a heart rate around 150 beats per minute. In contrast, an active

Magnificent Frigatebirds are huge, gangly seabirds found around the warm waters of the Western Hemisphere. When it comes time to mate, males inflate giant red throat sacs, then rattle and drum their bills against them to create jazzy percussive sounds.

Sporting a fancy tuft of feathers on its forehead and a bright orange nape, Maui island’s ‘ākohekohe is one Hawaiʻi’s strikingly beautiful native forest birds. ‘ākohekohe are also critically endangered. Habitat loss and disease from invasive mosquitoes are major threats to their survival.

In this episode, ornithologist J. Drew Lanham reads a letter he has written to a Pileated Woodpecker, a large species of woodpecker that is sometimes mistaken for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.