Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2025 i Audubon Magazine

In the middle of Alaska’s Bering Sea, St. Matthew Island and its much smaller neighbor Hall Island are among the few specks of land amid hundreds of square miles of water. These uninhabited volcanic isles host an impressive array of Arctic birds, including one of North America’s most enigmatic species: the McKay’s Bunting, which breeds only here. Last summer a team of scientists made a rare expedition to St. Matthew, voyaging more than 500 miles from the Aleutian Islands to conduct the third-ever McKay’s Bunting survey. They had a week to scour an island six times the size of Manhattan for the songbirds—a critical step for investigating what they worry is an ongoing population decline. Snow persists on St. Matthew’s slopes in early June. It’s the perfect cover for the…

Before Pantone You might have heard of Pantone’s color of the year—the premier color-standards company named Mocha Mousse the shade of 2025—but did you know that one of the earliest attempts to classify and name colors was based on birds? In the late 1800s taxonomist Robert Ridgway became fascinated with the stunning variety of hues found in avian plumage and took it upon himself to document as many as possible, from Peacock Blue to Duck Green. The final product, a compendium published in 1912, was an immediate hit. Read more at audubon.org/birdcolors. RE: “Sounds Like Fun” Our Field Note about the negative impacts of recreational noise on wildlife struck a chord with readers. “I just read the short piece in the Winter 2024 issue about the effects of noise—or even just…

IN EARLY SPRING, MELTED SNOW and rain trickle through forests, forming pools amid the leaf litter. Within these basins, life begins to sing. Frogs and salamanders migrate to these waters, where fairy shrimp emerge from dormant eggs. Though they reappear in the same places each year, these isolated wetlands, called vernal pools, are ephemeral, filling as winter ends and drying by late summer. With no fish or other aquatic predators, they’re vital nurseries for tiny critters and feeding grounds for reptiles, birds, and mammals. “You can hear them sometimes before you even see them, because they’re very active in the spring,” says Abby Pointer of the Michigan Nature Association. Vibrant as they are, vernal pools tend to “fall through the cracks,” Pointer says. Due to their seasonal nature and modest…

LOGGERHEAD SHRIKES WERE ONCE WIDESPREAD on Indiana’s family farms and pastures, but today fewer than 10 known pairs nest in the Hoosier State. One key reason: Squeezed by pressure to maximize productivity, farmers spent decades uprooting the shrubs and small trees where the fierce songbirds nested and the thorny bushes where they impaled prey like mice and insects. “Some of them will nest in the same bush year after year,” says Allisyn-Marie Gillet, state ornithologist for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. “And when it gets cut down, it’s over.” Since 2020 the Shrubs for Shrikes program has aimed to reverse that trend. Participating farmers agree to host at least four mature eastern redcedars on their property and maintain them for a minimum of 10 years. In exchange, they receive a…

AS THE SUN RISES OVER the white sand beaches and reddish-black waters of the Cubate River in the Brazilian Amazon, a shrill cry echoes through the thatched-roof houses in the Indigenous village of Nazaré. It is the call of the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock, or galo-da-serra, as the bird is locally known. Despite its bright orange feathers and exuberant half-moon crest, this exquisite forest bird is difficult to spot in the wild. But Darlene Florentino, a middle-aged Baniwa woman, keeps the two males her husband gifted her in a branch-fenced coop in her home. Indigenous families in the Amazon commonly raise wild animals, and the Baniwa in Nazaré love birds. Florentino’s husband collected the birds as chicks, retrieving them from a mud-plastered nest atop a massive rock inside a cave. The pets…

FOR BIRDS, KEEPING THEIR PLUMAGE CLEAN isn’t about good looks or vanity—it’s essential to their health. Feathers are marvelous structures, protecting birds from the elements and making flight possible, but they do require regular care. Most birds spend a lot of time preening: running feathers through their bills, from base to tip. Sometimes this activity occupies more than 10 percent of their waking hours. Preening smooths and aligns the feathers and removes some dirt, debris, or tiny parasites. But for enhanced cleaning, birds take frequent baths—in water, or sometimes in dust instead. Bathing is a vigorous ritual for robins and other midsize songbirds. Standing in shallow water, the bird fluffs out its feathers and dips its head and chest under the surface while flapping its wings, splashing water up over its…

AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON believes humans can restore and protect nature while staring down a planetary crisis. She’s convinced we can limit warming, prevent climate disasters, transform our culture, and find a way to have abundant and healthy life on Earth. But don’t call her an optimist. “Hope can be a very passive emotion,” says Johnson, a marine biologist, policy expert, and writer. “I think it’s insufficient. I think it’s tenuous.” It’s taken more than positive vibes for Johnson to become a leading voice on climate solutions. Instead, she says she’s been driven by deeper forces like tenacity, responsibility to others, and a deep-rooted love for what the future could be. Envisioning brighter days ahead—without donning rosecolored glasses—is the focus of What If We Get It Right?, the best-selling volume she…

SOUTH PELICAN ISLAND belongs to the birds. Royal Terns circle and screech above this spit of sand and shrub, which juts out of North Carolina’s winding Cape Fear River. Grackles hop among the bushes as sandpipers dart along the water. And as the name of the island suggests, Brown Pelicans abound. On a gleaming August morning, people have ventured into this avian realm to set up a temporary health clinic along the shore. Two volunteers perched on overturned buckets try to steady their current patient, a young Brown Pelican stretched across their laps. The bird ruffles its downy feathers and lets out dinosaur-like squawks as Lindsay Addison, a coastal biologist with Audubon North Carolina, examines its leg. She gently inserts a needle to draw deep red blood, while volunteer Marylou…

DALLAS MAY CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL THAT SOMETHING is missing. For more than a decade he’s been working to restore shortgrass prairie habitat to support wildlife on his family’s 20,000-acre ranch in southeast Colorado. His family rotationally grazes their Limousin cattle to give native grasses time to rest and recover, moving the 800 ebony and caramel-colored cows from pasture to pasture to feed on buffalograss and blue grama that grow near sand dropseed and little bluestem. Reintroduced black-footed ferrets scurry through tunnels in the loamy ground. Horned Larks and Grasshopper Sparrows sing from grass stalks, and elusive Eastern Black Rails scuttle through wetlands. But there’s one species May hasn’t seen move in yet: the Lesser Prairie-Chicken. “We’re hoping every day they show up,” he says. If the grouse do take…

WHEN LANCASTER UNIVERSITY marine ecologist Casey Benkwitt set out to study coral reefs in the Chagos Archipelago, she never thought she’d think so much about birds and their poop. Now, she and her colleagues are revealing the importance of island seabirds—and the guano they produce—to the health of these biodiversity hotspots: “It’s really intriguing and inspiring to think about how everything is connected.”Seabirds including Great Frigatebirds and Lesser Noddies are abundant on some of the Indian Ocean archipelago’s 50-plus islands, but others, home to invasive egg-eating rats, host few or none. By comparing marine life near islands with and without seabirds, Benkwitt and her team are documenting the birds’ cascading benefits: Guano delivers a nutrient infusion when it washes into the sea, enhancing reef resilience. “I’ve been just surprised over…

ROUGHLY 15 YEARS AGO DAVE Mickelson began to see flocks of Sandhill Cranes floating gently onto his Wisconsin farm, their long legs extended like aircraft landing gear. Spring after spring the elegant birds returned, plucking seeds from the rows of corn and soybeans he’d just planted. “If you see cranes in your field, it gets your blood pressure up a little bit,” he says. Mickelson wasn’t alone. Once nearly extinct in much of their range due to hunting and habitat destruction, Sandhill Cranes have rebounded mightily since the Migratory Bird Treaty Act protected them in 1918. The latest U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimate put the eastern population at more than 110,000 birds. But to many farmers, this conservation win poses a growing nuisance. The conflict has reached a crossroads…

IN THE LATE 1990S, AS AN ECOLOGIST AT THE University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Martin Wikelski guesses he drove every mile of the Prairie State’s backroads in a two-toned Olds mobile. But these were no joyrides; they were high-adrenaline all-nighters in the name of science. Each spring and fall evening, having outfitted another Swainson’s Thrush with a tiny radio transmitter, Wikelski drove like a “tornado chaser,” staying close enough to record the bird’s heartbeat, wingbeats, and vocalizations. His shift ended when the migrating thrush touched down, often hundreds of miles from where he’d tagged it—except when fl ashing red and blue lights in the rear-view mirror cut short his gonzo fieldwork. These days researchers no longer have to go to such extremes. Thanks to powerful new technology, an untold number of…

BUCKET LIST Prairie Dreams As seasonal ponds fill with water—and birds—these glacier-carved grasslands are a vision worth pursuing. THE SPRING MIGRATION WINGING NORTH over America’s midsection is often overlooked by birders. Yet some of the continent’s richest birdlife can be found among the ephemeral wetlands of the Great Plains and Upper Midwest. Called the prairie pothole region, this unique ecosystem spans five U.S. states and three Canadian provinces. It’s a little off the beaten path, but birders who make the trek can expect to see an extraordinary variety of waterfowl, shorebirds, and grassland species in and around these shallow pools and ponds, some of which hold water for mere days in the spring. Around 10,000 years ago, retreating glaciers left behind a landscape of smoothed-over hills pockmarked by small, often seasonal…