American Birding Podcast

The search for the perfect mnemonic is the bane of any field guide author, from Roger Tory Peterson to your podcast host. It's the part of writing about birds and birding that requires the most creativity, ans Nova Scotia author and artist Becca Rowland, The Girl in White Glasses, has come up with an entire book devoted to the weird and wonderful sounds birds make, and the weirdest and cleverest ways to describe those sounds. It's called Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds they Make from Storey Publishing. She joins us to talk bird noises and bird community. Also, some thoughts about the new taxonomy at Avilist.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

The state of Hawaii’s birds is a topic that is frequently front of mind to those of us who care about bird conservation, and on every island there are bird researchers and conservationists on the ground putting any number of conservation efforts into practice. Dr Hannah Mounce is the program manager of the Maui Forest Bird Recovery Project, and she joins us to talk about some of the most pressing efforts on the island.  Also, Nate finished his Breeding Bird Surveys and hopes that this isn't the last year for the venerable conservation project. Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

The story of the Florida Scrub-Jay is one that encompasses many modern conservation angles and concerns. Local government, bedrock federal legislation, development, climate change, eBird, and at the center of it, a remarkable and friendly endemic bird species. Recent challenges to conservation efforts in Florida have prompted the public interest group Earthjustice to intervene to help defend protections for the Florida Scrub Jay and lead attorney Aaron Bloome joins us to to lay out the threats to the jays and to all endangered species, and how birders have helped to make his case.  Also, the 2026 Young Birder of the Year Mentoring Program is open for registration! If you're a young birder, or you know a young birder, sign up now! Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!  

It's our 350th episode! And to celebrate, we've brought you a super-sized This Month in Birding, and not only because the panel of Jody Allair, Jennie Duberstein, and Martha Harbison had so much to say about truck-riding gulls, prehistoric birds, and the state of same-sex bird science. We hope you enjoy this summer-solstice sized episode.  Links to articles mentioned in the episode: The First GPS Observation of a Western Gull (Larus occidentalis) Riding in a Long-Haul Garbage Transfer Truck Study Reveals Birds Nested in the Arctic During the Age of Dinosaurs Same-sex partnerships in birds: a review of the current literature and a call for more data Study reveals songbirds change flight patterns over Midwest's vast farmlands Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

You don’t have to be a birder for a long time to appreciate that birds are capable of producing an astonishing array of colors and patterns, even those beyond what our weak human eyes can discern. Hidden in that avian rainbow are clues to bird taxonomy and evolution, which is the work of our guest Whitney Tsai Nakashima, a researcher at Occidental College’s Moore Lab of Zoology. Also, great news for one of south Texas's best birding sites.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

Break out your checklists and get ready for another summer of splits and lumps from the AOS North American Classification Committee. It’s time for our annual look at the proposed changes to the bird lists, the longest running segment on this podcast. And for every single one of those episodes, we've turned to biologist and birder Dr Nick Block of Stonehill College in Massachusetts. It's an interesting set of proposals this year, with Warbling Vireo splits, titmouse lumps, and lots of genetic mayhem.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

An interesting study discussed on the monthly This Month in Birding segment led us to Miranda Zemmerelli, a PhD student at Dartmouth University who has taken 50 years of hand drawn paper maps of bird territories at a New Hampshire forest, collected over many years by Dartmouth students, and brought those maps into the modern era to learn about how bird territories ebb and flow over the seasons. It's a great story of how the path of discovery winds its way from one researcher to the next. Miranda joins us to talk about her work. If you'd like to see what the maps look like, check out this write-up about her project.  Also, the Breeding Bird Survey and the Bird Banding Lab are set to be eliminated if a budget bill passes the US Senate, greatly threatening bird research not only in the US, but across the hemisphere. Learn more about it and what you can do.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We app

The end of May means, for many of us, the end of spring. But before this magical month is over we bring a great panel of birdy friends together to talk about some of the interesting bird news that has come across our vitual desks. Welcome Stephanie Beilke, Tim Healy, and Brodie Cass Talbott to talk birding without tech, warbler foraging strategies and the birds and bees, literally.  Links to items discussed in this episode: The Wonders of Bird-Watching without Tech Crows understand shapes and use geometry in everyday life Foraging on the wing: How can ecologically similar birds live together? Where the wild bees are: Birds improve indicators of bee richness Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!      

The 2025 Biggest Week in American Birding is in the books and the American Birding Podcast was there to host a fun little game with a few friends. Test your luck with our birdy quiz featuring a quartet of Biggest Week birders and guides along with special guests Wendell Troutner and Tyler Ficker! We've got modified anagrams, Star Wars crossovers, and more! Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

Nate is in Ohio for the Biggest Week, but hew had time to grab Birding editor Ted Floyd for another Random Birds before he headed off. Ted and Nate trust the random number generator to turn up some exciting birds for discussion including jaegers, pelicans, and shorebirds.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!    

When a person gets into birding they are not only confronted with a wide variety of wonderful and weird organisms but an equally wide variety of wonderful and weird terminology and jargon. It’s enough to confuse even the most enthusiastic novice, but hankfully, bird cartoonist Rosemary Mosco of Bird and Moon is on the case with a new book called The Birding Dictionary. This very funny addition to the birding lexicon features definitions for everything from adorbler to zygodactyl illustrated with Rosemary’s wonderful illustrations and she joins us to chat about the language of birders.  Plus, let us know if you'll be at Biggest Week and want to participate in the American Birding Podcast bird quiz! Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

It’s time for another This Month in Birding, this time for April, despite the fact that this episode technically comes out in May. That's bonus for May rather than a loss for April. Which is all the more appropriate because this is the time of year that we’ve all been waiting for. This tim around, we welcome Gabriel Foley, Frank Izaguirre, and Purbita Saha to talk bird study bias, hummingbird hives, and whether or not birds "sit".  Links to articles discussed in this episode: Six-decade research bias towards fancy and familiar bird species Hummingbirds Living in a Hive Found for the First Time Angler perceptions of pelican entanglement reveal opportunities for seabird conservation on fishing piers in Tampa Bay Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

Regular listeners to this podcast certainly know science writer Ryan Mandelbaum from their regular appearances on This Month in Birding. Those listeners who enjoy Ryan's wit and passion for wildlife will no doubt be exited to learn that Ryan has a new book, Wild NYC, a guidebook to nature observation in the United State’s largest city. While birds are this podcast's focus, the city's nature bona fides cannot be denied, and Ryan chats about the incredible geology, botany, and subway ferns that can be found in The Big Apple.  Also, the ABA is heading to the Biggest Week! We hope to see you there.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

A warmer and drier world means, unfortunately, a world in which wildfire becomes a greater risk. We know, all too well, the risk these fires pose to wild places, but there is surprisingly little we know about the risk to wildlife. That is the work of Dr. Olivia Sanderfoot, a researcher at UCLA looking at the impacts of wildfire smoke on wild birds and trying to answer a few of those increasingly relevant questions. Also, Nate is out of town and hoping to see Mississippi Kites.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!    

A deeply felt love of birds is something that can wind its way into all aspects of our lives. It is a journey that writer and pastor Courtney Ellis weaves into her most recent book, Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief, published last year and now available in audiobook. She is also the host of The Thing with Feathers podcast, available in a lot of the same places you can find this one. Also, the recent news about the "de-extinction" of an extinct wolf poses lots of questions for conservation.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!  

Migrating warblers are heading back to our backyards and patches, and included among that wonderful diversity come the weirdo “winged” warblers, Golden and Blue, whose intermixed genetics have long been fascinating and confusing. We welcome Nick Block, professor of biology at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, as well as Matt Hale, professor of biology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, the authors of an article covering the current state of winged warblers, published in the most recent issue of North American Birds to talk about them.  Also, a Cuban dove is now the poster-bird for ancient biogeography.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!      

March 2025 brings another This Month in Birding featuring a panel of birding friends here to talk about the month's new bird news and get ready for spring. This time around we welcome Jennie Duberstein, Bird Joy Pod's Jason Hall, and Nicole Jackson to talk plastics in seabirds, new eyes on old maps, and the best bird to party with. Links to articles discussed in this episode: Fifty years of songbird maps take flight in new hands Plastic pollution leaves seabirds with brain damage similar to Alzheimer’s, study shows How a hummingbird chick acts like a caterpillar to survive Coming off dry January, these birds are getting a little drunk Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!

The State of the Birds is a report put out by a veritable who's who of bird-related non-profit organizations, with the goal of sharing the current state, both positive and negative, of bird populations and bird conservation intiatives in the United States. The 2025 report builds on on the last incationation of the SOTB, but unfortunately finds many of the same issues vexing birds and bird conservation. In a podcast crossover episode with Mike Braesher of Ducks Unlimited and the Ducks Unlimited Podcast, the ABA welcomes Mike, Amanda Rodewald of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bradley Wilkinson of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies to talk about the report, and what birders can continue to do to support bird science and bird conservation.  Also, the recent loss of birding lunimary Victor Emmanuel stung many in the bird world. We celebrate him here. For more, see Pete Dunne's essay on Victor's legacy on the ABA website.  Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get

Birding editor Ted Floyd is back for another edition of Random Birds. Ted and Nate talk about avocets, sparrows, and more with the help of a random number generator and a big list of birds. Plus, some talk about the brand-new National Geographic guides written by Ted Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!    

Birders know about Big Data. We’re all familiar with eBird and the Avian Knowledge Network, but the Christmas Bird Count or the Breeding Bird Survey are giant pools of data that inform everything from conservation decisions to where to spend time tomorrow morning. But how can we use that data to encourage new birders or convince policy-makers to care about birds. It's something data artist Jer Thorp likes to think about. He is among other things, the New York Time’s first Data Artist in residence, and the creator of Bincoulars and Binomials and the author of the upcoming We Were Out Counting Birds. Also, a new discovery about bird brains could have huge impacts about what we can learn about bird intelligence. Subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and please leave a rating or a review if you are so inclined! We appreciate it!