Bird of Passage: March 2025
Book giveaway inside!
Hello friends. How are you holding up these days?
My year has gotten off to a bit of a slow start professionally, to be honest. I took some family-related time off at the end of 2024, which meant I started 2025 without much in the pipeline. Add to that the fact that I’m devoting more time and energy than I used to to activism and volunteering, and the general stress of everything making it hard to focus (my spouse is a federal employee, so that’s, uh, been fun), and I don’t have a lot to show right now on the “bird articles I got paid to write” front. And thanks to a combination of bad weather and schedule conflicts, I’ve barely managed to get out birding in the last month, either.
But here are a few things I have done this past month:
I helped teach some local first graders to use binoculars as part of a program for the Great Backyard Bird Count. It was chaotic but man, those kids’ joy and enthusiasm when they finally got those binoculars focused on a chickadee or a goldfinch was amazing.
I noticed when the song sparrows and juncos in our backyard suddenly started singing again. The juncos will be heading back up into the mountains shortly but the song sparrows, those cuties, will be here all summer. (Related: I taught my six-year-old how to spot juncos’ white outer tail feathers flashing as they fly around the yard.)
I’m a writing mentor for the American Birding Association’s Young Birder of the Year program, and I’ve started reviewing this year’s writing entries by inspiring young people across the country.
I marched in three protests, worked four volunteer shifts at the local homeless shelter, wrote some get-out-the-vote postcards, and called my legislators a bunch.
Also: The paperback edition of Flight Paths, my popular science book about the wildly entertaining history of bird migration research, comes out in less than two weeks! To celebrate, I’m doing a giveaway, and if you subscribe to this newsletter, you’re already entered. I’m going to randomly select one current subscriber and one new subscriber from the next month to receive a free autographed copy of the paperback from me. If you know anyone who you think would enjoy the book and this newsletter, forward this to them and encourage them to subscribe so they can be entered as well!
Thank you so much for your support—it means more than you can know. As always, feel free to reply or comment to share what’s been bringing you joy lately, bird-related or not.
Words About Birds
I’m not a football person, but I still enjoy the Superb Owl content that takes over the birding internet every February. If you somehow missed this annual owl-a-palooza, you can still check out Smithsonian Magazine’s roundup of 15 gorgeous photos of “superb” owls. My favorite is the one of the baby snowy owls!
I found this simultaneously fascinating and melancholy: as more and more historical bird records get uploaded into eBird, you can now find checklists in the database that include sightings of extinct species. This Audubon article includes links to documented observations of ivory-billed woodpeckers, Bachman’s warblers, and Carolina parakeets, among others.
Did you see the news about birds-of-paradise? As if they weren’t already fantastic enough, apparently these birds literally glow. Well, kind of. Testing on 37 of 45 species showed that their plumage was biofluorescent, absorbing light at one wavelength and re-emitting it at another. Apparently this might make the yellows and greens of their feathers appear even brighter than they would otherwise. Wow!
I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that white-throated sparrows basically have four genders, so I really enjoyed this refresher on the topic from Scientific American. Males and females can both have either white or tan head stripes. White-striped and tan-striped birds typically pair up to mate and raise young, and white-stripes are more aggressive and territorial than tan-stripes, regardless of their sex. Keep this in mind the next time someone tells you that gender roles are biologically determined!
Finally, a bit of good news: Hawaiian crows, which had been extinct in the wild, are once again flying free on the island of Maui. Past reintroduction attempts had been stymied by predation from hawks, but there aren’t any hawks on Maui, so there’s reason to hope things will go better this time. Not addressed in this article (sorry to be a downer) is how federal funding cuts are likely to affect Hawaiian bird conservation.
Book Recommendation of the Month
Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future by Daniel Lewis. Although this book isn’t exactly escapism (it absolutely delves into climate change and other conservation challenges), Lewis’s thoughtful, evocative writing is really enjoyable, and I’ve found it relaxing to spend time better getting to know the fascinating tree species profiled here. Some of them, like California redwoods and longleaf pines, I’ve experienced in person, but others, like sandalwoods and kapoks, I’m less familiar with.
Upcoming Events
Mar. 22: Keynote talk at Othello Sandhill Crane Festival (Othello, WA)
Apr. 10: Book talk for the Pendleton Bird Club (Pendleton, OR)
Apr. 22: Book talk for North Shore Audubon Society (virtual)