News Archive

Few birds are so easily identified in flight as a crow, cutting a sharp, sleek image against the sky or a woodland edge with powerful, deliberate wing beats and black form.

The Baltimore oriole is perhaps the most famous neotropical migratory bird. Its brilliant orange and black plumage is reminiscent of the crest of Lord Baltimore, an important figure in Maryland's history, and the bird has become the mascot of the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.

The harlequin duck (Histrionicus histrionicus) is a cult bird. I came to this conclusion very early in life. I grew up birding in Northern California in the '60s and '70s when breeding harlequins had been gone so long there they didn't even qualify as an ornithological memory.

The northern waterthrush ( Parkesia noveboracensis) is a swamp thing, a seeker of wet woodlands far from where most people go. Summers are spent amid the swamps and sluggish rivers of the far north's forests, with beavers, moose, and bears for neighbors. In winter, they head south to tropical swamps...