Backyard
Winter Roosts and the Brush Pile
The cheapest and most effective backyard habitat improvement is a heap of branches in a corner. The state of Ohio recommends them. Tidy neighbours object.
migration · The Lead
The Cuckoo That Disappears in June
Satellite tracking has finally answered the oldest question in British ornithology, and the answer involves the Congo basin and a remarkable amount of bad luck.
01
This week
In the field
From the editor
"What's at the feeder, what's overhead, what's gone."
02
Dispatches
From the road
03
Beats
Where we file from
04
More reading
Worth your week
05
Stay a while
Long reads of the season
Citizen Science
The Great Backyard Bird Count: A Four-Day Snapshot
Every February, hundreds of thousands of people count birds for four days. Jasper Wynn examines what such a brief survey can and cannot show.
Field Reports
A November Saturday at Wisconsin Point, Superior Harbor
From the easternmost rocks at 8:14 a.m., three jaeger species in ninety minutes and the lake birders who drove from St. Paul.
Migration
What the Yellow Sea Mudflats Still Hold
Two decades of seawall construction took most of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway's critical staging habitat. What survived is now under intensive watch.
Species
The Whip-Poor-Will Goes Quiet
On a ridge above the Greenbrier River, the writer's grandfather counted whip-poor-wills by ear from a screened porch each summer evening between 1958 and 1992. The 2026 count, from the same porch, was zero.
Endangered
The Amsterdam Albatross Returns to a Plateau It Almost Lost
On an island in the southern Indian Ocean, a fungal disease that nearly took a 170-pair seabird population is, after a decade of intervention, finally on the back foot.
Backyard
What the Cat Takes from the Yard
A camera-trap study in three Massachusetts towns put numbers to the household cat's contribution to backyard bird mortality. The numbers are not small.
Habitat
The Tidal Edge: Saltmarsh Sparrow on the Last Productive Marshes
On the high marsh at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, the saltmarsh sparrow is timing its nesting to a tide cycle that no longer offers the margin it once did. The species may not have the decade.
Songs
Subsong: The Quiet Rehearsal of Young Birds
Before a young songbird produces full adult song it goes through a long quiet practice called subsong, which sounds like nothing in particular and is, in fact, where everything is learned. Inara Khan visits a Bombay rooftop where a juvenile magpie-robin is at work.
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Masthead
Contributors
The Sunday note
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Reader letters
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Corrections, dissents, small additions, the occasional reminiscence about a piece we covered.
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