Birds

Ross’s Gull. Photo: John Breitsch/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Hurricane Sandy swept a rare visitor to New York’s Finger Lakes Region: A Ross’s gull. This small, dove-like bird is seldom seen outside of the Arctic. It’s just one of the birds swept off its path by the storm.

Can you identify what kind of bird this is? Hint: A chick of this species hatched this week at the Central Park Zoo—making it one of the few of its kind living in a zoo in the United States.

Click through for the answer and a quiz about the bird.

A brown-headed cowbird (By Alan Vernon/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

It was the opposite of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” Avian ecologist Andrew Cox had spent a lot of time in Missouri’s woods and fields filming bird nests for his doctoral thesis, and songbird chicks seemed to be doing better than expected. He also noticed that brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in songbirds’ nest, were doing so less often than earlier reports suggested. A question came to mind: Could the two be related?

^{Photo credit: Scott Ableman / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0}

^{UPDATE: Turns out, people are wild for boobies! Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry (here, on our Facebook page, or on National Audubon's Facebook page). And the winner is...}

Every week we post a funny animal photo that's begging for a caption. Click "Read more" to add your suggestion in the Comments section by 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Sunday. On Monday we'll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.
Check out our top choices from last week’s photo of an impala and a couple red-billed oxpeckers and all previous weeks.

Birds made the presidential debate again last night—but this time Big Bird wasn’t center stage. Instead, the birds flew in during a question about gas prices and more broadly, energy policy and drilling.

What birds do you associate with Halloween? Ravens, perhaps, or crows? Don’t forget vultures. What could be creepier than a bald bird that feeds on rotting flesh? Here's how to tell the differences between two common vulture species. 

In our 10th edition of Birds Make the Art, we’ve got two collage artists and a painter. They all make birds beautiful.

UPDATE: We've narrowed it down to three entries for this week's caption contest. Now it's up to you to select the winner!

Every week we post a funny animal photo that's begging for a caption. Click "Read more" to add your suggestion in the Comments section by 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Sunday. On Monday we'll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.

Check out our top choices from last week’s photo of a hanging sloth and all previous weeks.

Forget the changing leaves and pumpkin-spiced everything. For bird enthusiasts, fall's big event is welcoming new birds as they pass through on migration. In North America, most bird species migrate to some extent, with more than 350 species traveling to the tropics each fall.

^{Photo: Will Keightley/CC BY-SA 2.0}

Around the country, the birders and cat lovers frequently face off, engaging in small-scale skirmishes and lobbying for state legislation that regulates trap-neuter-release (TNR) in feral cat colonies. A new study in PLos ONE looks at why these two groups are so polarized and how they can work together to care for both birds and cats.