Alex 
The drumming is the giveaway, but there’s a lot more going on with woodpeckers than the sound they’re famous for. Here’s what actually defines a woodpecker as a group, and what they’re really after when they’re hammering away at a …
If you’ve ever heard a repetitive, almost hypnotic “whip-poor-WILL, whip-poor-WILL” echoing through the woods at dusk, you’ve heard one of the most distinctive — and most rarely seen — sounds in North American birding. Whippoorwills are heard far more often …
The image of an eagle plucking a fish clean out of a river is accurate, but it’s only part of the story. Eagles are opportunistic, often surprisingly lazy hunters willing to steal, scavenge, or improvise — which is a big …
If there’s one word that sums up a crow’s diet, it’s “everything.” Crows are among the most dietarily flexible birds in North America, and that flexibility — more than intelligence alone, though they have plenty of that too — is …
Ducks might be the single most-fed wild bird in the world, purely because of how many people visit a park pond with a bag of bread in hand. Ironically, bread is one of the worst things you can actually give …
Hawks are opportunistic predators, and that single fact explains almost everything about their diet. A hawk isn’t loyal to one kind of prey the way a hummingbird is loyal to nectar — it eats whatever is available, easy to catch, …
Blue jays have a reputation problem. Ask around and you’ll hear they bully smaller birds off the feeder, steal eggs, and generally act like the neighborhood troublemaker. Some of that is fair. A lot of it is a smart, loud …
Bird reproduction gets summed up online in one slightly awkward phrase — the “cloacal kiss” — and then people are usually left with more questions than they started with. Here’s the fuller picture, from courtship through to the eggs actually …
Anyone who’s fed birds for more than a season runs into the same handful of headaches: a lawn full of sprouting seed hulls, a bird bath turning green, wasps taking over the hummingbird feeder. None of it is complicated to …
A lot of the questions people ask about birds aren’t about which species is which — they’re more basic than that. Do they even have ears? Are those legs covered in scales because they’re secretly reptiles? Here are straight answers …