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.
Citizen science editor
Pell Murphy
Pell Murphy has submitted over 4,000 eBird checklists since 2014. He edits the magazine's citizen science section.
Beats
Published in Roost
Endangered
The Rufa Red Knot Has Found, Briefly, Enough Crab Eggs
On the Delaware Bay beaches in May, a shorebird population whose collapse paralleled the horseshoe crab harvest of the 1990s posted its best refuelling season in eleven years.
Habitat
The Drawdown Zone: Inland Reservoirs as Wintering Habitat for Waterfowl
On the exposed mudflats of Kentucky's Lake Barkley in early winter, a small revolution in waterfowl distribution is playing out. Reservoir shorelines, managed for hydrology, are quietly producing some of the continent's most productive inland wintering habitat.
Songs
The Cardinal in Winter
The Northern cardinal is one of the few common North American songbirds that sings substantially in winter, and one of the few in which the female sings nearly as often as the male. Pell Murphy listens through a North Carolina January.
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.
Backyard
The Water Feature as Bird Magnet
A heated birdbath in a Cleveland suburb produced more species in one winter than the same yard's feeders had produced in eight.
Endangered
Lead Is Still the Story for California Condors at Pinnacles
Twenty-three years into the southern release programme, the condor's recovery is real and the cause of nearly every preventable death is still ammunition fragments in carrion.
Species
The Mourning Dove's Quiet Decline
The breeding bird survey route runs from a gas station in Adams County, Ohio, up through 24.5 miles of farmland. In June 2026, the mourning dove count was 41. In June 1990 it was 112.
Songs
The White-crowned Sparrow Dialects of San Francisco
Since Peter Marler's 1970 maps, the Nuttall's white-crowned sparrow has been one of the most thoroughly documented examples of song dialect in any bird. Pell Murphy walks three neighborhoods to hear what has and has not changed.
Citizen Science
Project FeederWatch and What the Numbers Have Quietly Shown
Forty years of counts at suburban bird feeders have produced an unusual dataset. Pell Murphy looks at what it has told us about a continent's winter birds.
Migration
The Night Radar Sees What the Eye Cannot
How NEXRAD weather radar, designed for storms, has quietly become the most important tool in North American migration science.
Habitat
Bluebird Trails in the Cul-de-Sac: One Suburban Yard in Cary, North Carolina
Margaret Eldridge has run a five-box bluebird trail through her cul-de-sac in Cary for nineteen years. The data tell a story about what suburban land can still do, when one person decides to do it.
Field Reports
Bald Eagles at Conowingo, the First Saturday in November
Below the Susquehanna's last dam, eighty-three eagles in a single morning, and the photographers who have stood there for fifteen years.
Field Reports
An October Afternoon on the North Lookout at Hawk Mountain
Twelve hundred broad-winged hawks in ninety minutes, and the volunteer counter who has called the species since 1991.
Backyard
Cleaning a Feeder Properly, with Reasons
Salmonellosis kills more backyard finches than cats, and the prevention is a five-gallon bucket, a brush, and a Saturday morning rhythm.
Citizen Science
eBird at Twenty: The Quiet Revolution in Amateur Bird Data
When the Cornell Lab launched eBird in 2002, no one expected birders would file more than a hundred million checklists. Pell Murphy looks back at the numbers, and at the people who put them in.