What does a Blue Jay symbolize? The old records make the jaybird the devil's Friday errand-runner, with a few luck and rain omens; Native American stories make it a watcher and boaster; Thoreau and ...

Why the Mourning Dove is called that, what American folk beliefs said about its call (rain, love, luck and death), its names in Cherokee, Navajo and Nahuatl, the doves of the Bible, and what modern ...

A Goldcrest's song is a very high, thin run of notes rocking between a higher and a lower pitch, ending in a short flourish; the calls are thin and high. Listen to recordings from Britain, see them as ...

Identify any bird by photo, sound, or description — then learn what it eats, how to attract it, and when it's near you. From ...

The birds people mix up most, side by side, with the one feature that settles each pair: Kestrel or Sparrowhawk, Raven or ...

Every autumn, Pacific Golden-Plovers leave the Arctic tundra and fly non-stop across 4,800 km of open ocean to reach Hawaii — a journey of three to four days with no chance to land, rest, or feed. To ...

Bold white wing patches that flash like a crescent moon in flight, crimson eyes ringed with bare blue skin, and a call widely immortalised in a Stevie Nicks hit — the White-winged Dove is one of North ...

The Red Junglefowl is the wild ancestor of every domestic chicken on Earth — a bird whose crow, cluck, and scratch have shaped human civilisation more than any other. Males are spectacular: a cascade ...

Alone among North American shorebirds, the Solitary Sandpiper nests in trees — borrowing the abandoned nests of robins and waxwings high in boreal spruces rather than scraping a hollow in the ground.

A shorebird that looks like a yellowlegs, feeds like a dowitcher, and belongs to neither group, the Stilt Sandpiper is one of North America's most distinctive waders. Its long greenish-yellow legs, ...

Velvety black from crown to tail, with a bill patterned in orange-red, yellow, white, and black — the male Surf Scoter carries the most ornate bill of any North American duck. Hunters nicknamed it the ...

A glossy black hood, a delicate rosy-pink flush on the breast, and a migration that spans the length of two continents — Franklin's Gull is one of North America's most striking small gulls. Breeding ...