The American Birding Podcast

As is our tradition, the end of the year means it's time for a look back at the best bird books published this year. Once again, 10,000 Birds  book reviewer Donna Schulman joins me to talk about our favorites. Donna and I each share our Top 5, including field guides, family specific guides, and narratives from well-known authors and publishers. Thanks to Zeiss Sports Optics for sponsoring this epi...

The ABA's 50th Anniversary roadshow rolls on, this time to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival for another LIVE show. Our special bird-themed game show features guest appearances from Birds of North America 's Jason Ward and Birding magazine editor and podcast stalwart Ted Floyd. Listen in for fun birdy games, Rio Grande Valley anagrams, real or fake bird mnemonics and an Eagles themed parody s...

Many birders throughout the ABA Area have been paying attention to the ongoing situation in South Texas with regard to the construction of the border wall. So many of our favorite birding sites have been under threat, and the situation has been alternately sad and triumphant and frustrating. Filmmaker Otilia Portillo Padua offers her insight into the often fraught affair with Birders , a short doc...

How many of you out there have dressed as a bird for Halloween? Many, we're sure! But there is obviously so much more that can be done in the realm of bird costuming, and Dr. Lisa Buckley has taken bird inspired cosplay to its logical extreme. In her day job she is a vertebrate paleontologist in British Columbia but on the side she has created Bird Glamour , eye makeup inspired by a whole host of...

The incredible variety of bird song in a morning chorus on a spring or summer day is a phenomenon that a lot of birders are familiar with. But even after centuries of study there is still a lot we don't know about bird vocalizations, especially the world of female birdsong. The vocalizations of female birds are frequently as complex and important to the lives of birds as the songs we associate wit...

3 Billion breeding birds have been lost in the last 40 years in the US and Canada. These are certainly sobering numbers. This was the conclusion of a paper published recently in the journal Science , and the core of the 2019 State of the Birds report. This report, spearheaded by American Bird Conservancy, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Canadian Wildlife Service, and others certainly made waves among...

All birders intuitively understand the value of birding, even if we're not so great as a community as expressing that value. Birding as a means for personal growth, and coming to grips with the changing world around us is an important part of why we enjoy this hobby. It's certainly a fascinating topic with a lot of rich veins to mine. It's something that Dr. Trish O'Kane of the University of Vermo...

The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season is underway with a handful of storms already named. In the last couple decades human meteorologists have gotten pretty good at predicting the strength and track of tropical storms in the Atlantic basin, but still less good at predicting the severity of any individual season. But as it turns out, that's something Veerys, the ruddy Catharus thrush with the swirly s...

Located in the northeast corner of the ABA Area, the island of Newfoundland is known for its incredible rarity pedigree. But there's far more to this beautiful place than European vagrants. The city of St. John's is a gateway to unbelievable nature experiences, from seabird colonies containing thousands upon thousands of charismatic Atlantic Puffins and Northern Gannets, to the sight of dozens of...

Fantasy Sports is big business these day, especially now that participants no longer have to do the work by hand. It's so popular that managing virtual worlds based on real world data has spread beyond sports. Fantasy Birding has become a obsession among a growing cadre of real birders, it has been featured in a number of general interest articles, it was lightly mocked on the NPR show Wait Wait D...

What does it mean to be an "expert" birder? And do the skills that make one an expert necessarily translate to the skills that are most in demand when it comes to promoting the birding community in a positive way?  Birding  editor Ted Floyd joins host Nate Swick to talk about expertise in birding and the many ways in which it manifests in the birding world, and why the very birders who are so forw...

The ABA's summer camps have long been an avenue for young birders to take in some excellent birding opportunities, to network with other young birders, and to learn about career opportunities in birding and ornithology. So many young people who have gone on to become influential in our community have come through ABA camps and other young birder camps, and many more consider it a seminal experienc...

Birders love to watch the birds at their feeders from the comfort of their own home, but those windows we depend on can cause quite a few problems for birds, something that Heidi Trudell is all too aware of. She is the creator of the Facebook group Dead Birds for Science and the website Just Save Birds , and an advocate for birds safe glass and construction, as well as getting people comfortable w...

It's taxonomy time again, bird nerds! The 2019 proposals to the American Ornithological Society's Classification Committee are chock full of splits, name changes, and a couple proposals that may or may not set some interesting precedents in the way we interact with bird common names. As we have before, we lean again on Dr. Nick Block, professor of Biology at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachuse...

What do birding and board games have in common? More than you'd expect! Birder and game designer Elizabeth Hargrave has made it a mission to bring these two things together and her bird-themed game Wingspan , released earlier this year to great reviews, does just that. Wingspan has been covered by the New York Times , Smithsonian, and Science magazine among other places and has managed to elicit i...

The ABA's 50th Anniversary and The Biggest Week's 10th Anniversary coincide this year and it's a great time to celebrate both stalwarts of the birding community. We threw a bird party and recorded the very first LIVE episode of the American Birding Podcast featuring special guests, live music, and more! We're excited to share it all with those who couldn't be with us that evening.  Special thanks...

Kenn Kaufman is one of America's best known birders, and he has done just about everything a person can do in the birding world. He's a guide, an artist, an incredibly skilled birder, and an author of several books, the latest of which is called A Season on the Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration . Kenn's new book is a love letter to northwest Ohio, a compelling story about the phenomenon o...

Dr. Kaeli Swift knows crows. And she's watched them do some pretty extraordinary things. In fact all corvids-the family that includes crows, jays, magpies, and others-have a well deserved reputation for intelligence and fascinating social behaviors. Dr. Swift's research has provided insights into how crows interact with us, with their dead, and with each other. She joins host Nate Swick from Denal...

Birders know the South American nation of Colombia as the most bird-rich country on the planet, but Colombia's reputation among the general public is unfortunately somewhat more mixed. That is something that the Colombian government and non-profits who work there are trying to fix, as Colombia is heavily playing up its bona fides as a travel destination. Luckily for nature-lovers, birding is a big...

Spring is finally on its way and with it, the promise of returning migratory birds to the United States and Canada. Among the first to arrive every year, and beloved among birders and non-birders alike, is North America's largest swallow, the Purple Martin. With their chatty and gregarious nature martins have inspired so many people, one of whom is Dr. Kevin Fraser of the Avian Behavior and Conser...

The February 2019 issue of  Birding  magazine is noteworthy not only for being the Bird of the Year issue, or for launching the 50th Anniversary of the ABA, but for another, less obvious, reason. February 2019 is the 100th issue of  Birding for which Ted Floyd has been editor-in-chief. The 16 years that Ted has been in charge of the ABA's flagship publication have seen a lot of changes, not just i...

The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas is one of the most special places in the ABA Area­ for birders and naturalists, hosting some exceptional species and some iconic birding locations. It's why so many birders have watched the politics around the proposed construction of a border wall in the Valley so closely and why we, along with many other stakeholders, have mobilized to protect those places. O...

Cornell's eBird has been around for 16 years now, and 2019 finds it as ingrained in the birding community, especially in North America, as it's ever been. More users than ever plugging more data than ever into the project, which in turn facilitates a ton of great information that informs research, conservation, and everyday birding. In the last few weeks of 2018, eBird launched a new status and tr...

Multimedia bird artist Megan Massa is the latest artist to create the Bird of the Year cover art, an auspicious list that includes David Sibley, Julie Zickefoose, and Louise Zemaitis, among others. Her experiences have run the gamut from the hobby side of birding to birds research to art and her creation, a Red-billed Tropicbird soaring over a boat full of birders will be featured on the cover of...

Days are short, weather is at or near its coldest, and it's easy to just suspend birding for a few months and wait for Spring. But that would be missing out on some truly great birding experiences, including Christmas Counts, which many birders consider to be a highlight of their year. We are currently in the middle of the CBC season host Nate Swick welcomes two birders who are no strangers to win...