Bird Behavior & Ecology: How Birds Live, Feed & Migrate

A birder went to Carleton-sur-Mer to see a Hudsonian Whimbrel and found the wrong curlew standing beside it. What the record is, and how to behave if you go.

Crossbills turn up when they feel like it, in any month, and then vanish. Here is what decides where they go, when they breed, and how you can find out which population you just met.

Courtship and female choice are only part of how birds reproduce. The other part is conflict, and the anatomy it has produced is some of the most remarkable evidence in evolutionary biology.

A Song Sparrow feeding a fledgling twice its size is not a bird being stupid. It is the visible end of an evolutionary contest that has been running for millions of years.

Birds have a reputation as the good parents of the animal world. The data says the truth is far more uneven, and the exceptions run in both directions.

The birds we hold up as models of lifelong partnership do leave each other, and the conditions that make them do it turn out to explain a great deal about how pair bonds work.

It started with a puzzle nobody could explain: gull nests holding twice as many eggs as they should. The answer turned out to be two females, and it landed in the middle of a fight it never asked for.

Saw-whet owls are among the most common owls in the boreal forest and among the least seen. A banding night is the one reliable way to meet one, and it exists because researchers went out after dark and found a migration nobody knew was happening.

Soaring raptors will not cross cold water, so coastlines gather them. Where the Saguenay fjord meets the St. Lawrence estuary, that rule produces one of eastern North America's cleanest migration bottlenecks, and one of its great places to stand.

Quebec's North Shore hosts its sixteenth migratory bird festival from 21 to 27 September 2026. Here is what the week actually contains, what it costs, and what to book before it fills.

Some male birds own nothing, defend nothing, and raise nothing. They gather on a shared stage, dance, and let the females decide. Here is how that system works and why it produces the most extravagant birds alive.

Courtship is the most watchable thing birds do, and the most easily ruined by watching it badly. Here is how to find displays, how to behave at them, and what to carry.

The physical act takes about a second, and almost everything interesting about bird reproduction happens around it. Here is the full picture, from anatomy to the social arrangements birds actually run.

A lost Tropical Kingbird in a city park and a Glossy Ibis nesting in Maine look like the same story. They are not. Here is how vagrancy and range expansion actually differ, and why both are showing up more often.

Most songbirds migrate at night and navigate by the stars. We explain how artificial light disorients them, why strikes spike in spring and fall, and the one thing you can do.