
Field Reports
Yellow Rails at Anahuac, the First Week of May
A controlled prairie burn at sundown, three rail species in a single sweep, and the cooperative banding crew that has worked this marsh for twenty years.
Habitat editor
Inara Khan works on urban wetland conservation in South Asia and edits Roost's Habitat section from a small flat in Bandra.
Beats

Field Reports
A controlled prairie burn at sundown, three rail species in a single sweep, and the cooperative banding crew that has worked this marsh for twenty years.

Species
At 8:46 p.m. on May 30, on a flat-roofed parking garage on Broadway in Saskatoon, a common nighthawk hunted moths against a sodium-vapor glow. The roof had hosted nighthawk nests since at least 1979. The next renovation, scheduled for 2027, will install a green roof.

Backyard
A landscape architect in Asheville spent six years converting a half-acre lawn into a bird-supporting yard. The species count tripled. The water bill dropped.

Migration
Two decades of seawall construction took most of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway's critical staging habitat. What survived is now under intensive watch.

Habitat
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
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.

Citizen Science
Since 1974, an unusual network of amateur counters has tracked the shorebirds that move between the Arctic and Patagonia. Inara Khan walks a count site at Plum Island.

Migration
At High Island and Sabine Woods, the difference between a good migration year and a bad one is measured in caterpillar abundance and the wind on the Gulf.

Endangered
Five years after the first reintroductions in northeastern Brazil, the released birds are forming pair bonds, defending territory, and producing the species' first wild-hatched chicks in twenty-six years.

Backyard
The North American Bluebird Society's standard plan has not meaningfully changed since 1978. A retired carpenter in Vermont explains why.

Habitat
On the cracked slab of a former steel coking plant on the Monongahela, a chestnut-sided warbler sings from a sumac no one planted. The brownfield is doing the work no one budgeted for.