Bird of Passage: November 2025
Happy November! Here are three short items that may be of interest...
Happy November! Rather than me blathering on about my latest birding outings and what have you, this month I thought I’d just share three short items that may be of interest.
First: The Institute for Bird Populations, and independent nonprofit that does a lot of really great avian ecology research in the western U.S., has an emergency fundraising appeal going to try to make up for the losses of federal grants that were funding a lot of their work.
Second: It’s fall leaf season. Being lazy with your leaf raking is a great way to help the insects that live in your yard. Don’t just leave them on the grass, but rake them into your landscaping beds and let them gradually decompose there.
Third: Starting to think about holiday gifts for the bird lovers in your life? Here’s a reminder that my book is now available in paperback and would make a great stocking stuffer!
Onward!
Words About Birds
For The Revelator, I wrote about two studies from two different parts of the world that were both published this past summer and both show how extreme weather events fueled by climate change are contributing to long-term bird population declines. Typically scientists have pointed to habitat loss as the biggest driver of the huge, ongoing bird declines seen in North America and elsewhere, but these studies point to the rise of climate change as a second, interconnected threat.
Moving on to stories not by me: Bird communication is endlessly fascinating, and amazingly, unrelated bird species on different continents seem to share a similar basic “vocabulary” of alarm calls, responding appropriately to the alarm calls of species they’ve never interacted with before. The latest addition to this line of research shows that 21 bird species from around the world use a similar call to warn about the proximity of nest parasites like cuckoos and cowbirds!
As someone who’s been low-key obsessed with Great Auks for a long time, I was fascinated to learn that scientists recently used DNA evidence to locate the remains of what was likely the very last female Great Auk, killed off of Iceland in 1844, in a natural history museum in Cincinnati. These flightless relatives of puffins stood over 2.5 feet tall and were driven to extinction by human hunting.
I still kinda regret not driving down to Oregon to see the 2017 total solar eclipse, but I enjoyed reading about a new study that looked at how birds responded to the more recent one in April of last year. The researchers drew from backyard birdsong recording devices and also created an app that let anyone submit observations of bird behavior around the event, and they showed how birds across the continent sang their morning "dawn chorus" songs as the eclipse ended even though the "night" had only been four minutes long.
Finally: I’m a week late for Halloween, but I know you want to read about giant bats in Europe catching migrating birds in mid-air and eating them. Trust me. You do. It’s wild.
Book Recommendation of the Month
Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. This book was first published way back in 2009; I picked up a copy on a whim at a bookstore in Seattle this spring, and just got around to reading it. It’s not so much a book about crows as a series of essays about applying a naturalist’s mindset to an urban environment, with crows as a running theme. I would have enjoyed it even more if the author had shown a little more awareness of her own privilege as an upper-middle-class white lady who could afford to leave her full-time job when her daughter was born (it doesn’t seem to occur to her that many people simply don’t have the time to engage in nature study like she does!), but overall I liked it.
As always, feel free to leave a comment or reply to this newsletter via email! See you next month.