Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2021 i Audubon Magazine

The diversity of birds continues to amaze us. Their colorful plumages, fascinating ecologies, and complex behaviors enrich our lives and challenge our imaginations. In an entrancing collection, Birds (Abrams, November 2, 2021), photographer Tim Flach invites us to wonder anew at avian diversity—capturing with his camera awe-inspiring images of natural phenomena that I explore in the book’s accompanying text. With their sensuous textures, striking color patterns, and whimsical highlights, birds’ beauty certainly delights us, but its real audience is birds themselves. Avian ornaments have evolved through their capacity to intrigue, entrance, inform, and attract mates. In this way, birds are agents in their own evolution.…

Bonus Footage Didn’t get enough of the 2021 Audubon Photography Awards? Head to our website to see 10 more fabulous submissions to our new video category. From stunning Cedar Waxwings visiting a backyard “bird spa” to Acorn Woodpeckers fiercely defending their territory, these clips capture vivid and intimate moments that show birds in all their beauty and power. As with the award winners and Top 100 images, our team worked in close collaboration with the videographers to ensure that the intent and essence of each clip was incorporated into vibrant alternative text to make the awards accessible to the largest audience possible. Visit audubon.org/APAvideos. RE: Summer 2021 Thank you AUDUBON PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS for this very fine issue of Audubon. I have been a member of Audubon for almost 50 years, and…

UNDER A BRIGHT BLUE SKY IN early May, about 20 people gathered at a boat ramp south of Ocean City, Maryland, to launch an unusual structure into Chincoteague Bay: A makeshift island that could be Common Terns’ best chance to survive in the region. The volunteers wheeled eight 8-by-16-foot wooden platforms into the water and connected them two at a time. Then a backhoe operator coated them with crushed clam shells, and—painstakingly slowly—a boat captain pulled each quadrant to an undisclosed location that would provide protection from curious tourists, hungry predators, noisy boats, and extreme weather. There, the team bolted everything together to create a single floating island the size of a small apartment. Voilá, nesting habitat for dozens of Common Tern pairs. Or so conservationists hoped. This was the…

OBEDIENT, NIMBLE, AND ARMED WITH A SENSE OF SMELL THOUGHT TO BE up to 100,000 times stronger than our own, dogs aren’t just great companions—they’re the ultimate coworkers. They were the first animals humans domesticated, and in our thousands of years together we’ve realized they can handle an array of difficult tasks. Today dogs help with everything from rescuing people trapped in avalanches to sniffing out coronavirus cases. Increasingly, they’re using their canine superpowers on behalf of wildlife conservation. With their turbo-charged scent receptors, dogs are uniquely qualified for green jobs we can’t do alone. They can turn up endangered species, track down poachers, root out invasive pests, and prevent the spread of wildlife diseases. “Their potential is honestly boundless,” says Jennifer Hartman, a handler and cofounder of conservation canine company…

THE JOE FAMILY WAS GATHERED at Arthur and Queen Ester Joe’s home in Newbern, Alabama, on a summer evening in the early 1970s when the children asked about the white figures standing outside. Queen Ester told them not to worry as she rushed them to the back of the house. Draped in white robes, like a nightmare ripped from a Southern dreamscape, Ku Klux Klan members stood idly by the mailbox, says the couple’s grandson Christopher Joe, who heard the story from a cousin who was there that day. It wasn’t the first attempt to scare the Joe family off of their 200-acre farm, and it wouldn’t be the last. Weeks after the Klan’s display, their home and those of two other nearby Black farmers were burned to the ground.…

WHEN MOVING BETWEEN THEIR summer and winter homes, migrating birds may not always follow the shortest straight-line distance. Consider Connecticut Warblers (below). During spring migration you’re unlikely to see one in Connecticut, or anywhere in the Northeast. Why? Because their spring route mostly passes farther west. The songbirds travel north through Florida and then mainly track to the west of the Appalachians en route to breeding grounds in central Canada. It’s not until fall that they earn their name: The warblers move east through New England before turning south. Or take Hudsonian Godwits. In spring these large sandpipers fly north through the center of North America, stopping over on the Great Plains as they head toward the Arctic. In fall they gather at key staging sites in Canada before flying eastward,…

PIGEONS HAVE A BAD REPUTATION. Maybe these birds’ familiarity makes them an easy target: They are common denizens of every continent, save Antarctica. Some people think pigeons are dirty or diseased, as they spend chunks of their days pecking at trash. Others might ignore them entirely, or perhaps go so far as to call them “rats with wings.” But Rosemary Mosco, a science writer, cartoonist, and naturalist, believes these creatures deserve more respect. “We’ve gotten them super wrong,” she says. In Mosco’s latest book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching (Workman Publishing, $15, 240 pages), she shares her positive views of the species that fell from grace. Once highly valued for their meat, fertilizing excrement, and wayfinding abilities, pigeons are now largely rejected by human society. But Mosco, a lifelong city…

THE NEWS ON CLIMATE THIS summer has been grim. Not only did an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report paint a depressing future, the dire consequences of unchecked emissions are already wreaking havoc across the globe. Those effects include powerful storms across the eastern half of the United States, and brutal heat that seared the West, killing more than 200 people. It did a number on birds, too. The temperatures, which exceeded 110°F in places where it rarely gets above 85°F, drove young birds to fling themselves from their nests in a desperate attempt to escape the heat. In Seattle, most of the chicks in a Caspian Tern colony leapt from their rooftop nesting site; Seattle Audubon and Audubon Washington worked with rehabbers to save as many birds as they…

After prolonged neglect, Mexico’s Colorado River Delta is beginning to teem with life. This summer Ridgway’s Rails and Least Bitterns prowled in lush marshes. People jumped into the river’s water to escape recordbreaking heat, or enjoyed picnics on the shore. Fish long absent shimmered in sunlit water. This life aquatic was unthinkable until recently. Beginning in 1922, water-sharing agreements among the seven U.S. states in the Colorado River basin and Mexico claimed nearly every drop of the once-mighty waterway, which begins high in the Rocky Mountains and wends 1,450 miles to northwest Mexico, where it empties into the Sea of Cortez. Over ensuing decades, dams and diversions built to sustain farms and growing cities from Colorado to California left little water for downstream stretches south of the border. By the…

Laurie Goodrich, director of conservation science at Pennsylvania’s Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, has witnessed 35 fall raptor migrations. She shares why hawkwatching still excites her today. AUDUBON: What makes hawkwatching different from other kinds of birding? GOODRICH: It’s an opportunity to see raptors up close and fully in their element in flight. It’s exciting to see typically rare creatures on our landscape gliding past in big numbers. It’s not just raptors: We get hundreds of jays going by, swallows, finches. I like to get up early for the songbird flight and stay for the raptors. A: What’s your most memorable hawkwatch experience? G: Years ago I woke up in the middle of the night; the shutters on the house were banging because of powerful winds. Cold fronts concentrate hawks along corridors,…

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 9, 2020, Sebastian Velasquez woke to a moody amber sky above his Northern California home. It was the middle of a wildfire season that, by its end, would scorch more than 4 million acres and claim dozens of lives. People locked themselves indoors to evade the smoke. But the now 19-year-old college student, and youth winner of the 2019 Audubon Photography Awards, felt driven to capture the “scarily orange” scene. He drove to nearby Pescadero State Beach, donned a respirator, and headed for the waterline with his camera. Velasquez wasn’t sure he would be able to see any birds through the haze—until he spotted a group of godwits and curlews foraging along the shore, seemingly unfazed by the smoke. It was a challenging environment. The ash-clouded…

when pondering which species to choose for this assignment, artist e bond consulted her mom. The Common Loon decisively won the maternal vote. The white stipples and swatches adorning the bird’s breeding plumage also appealed to bond, a California-based mixed-media artist. bond decided to reinterpret John James Audubon’s exacting original through her own aesthetic of abstract shapes and patterns. “He was trying to really record and document,” bond says, whereas she felt liberated to experiment with both composition and style. Her loon is in motion, the frothy white loops an “ode to water.” To build her bird, bond first handcrafted a “library” of paper layers embellished with acrylic paint or pencil. One layer, for instance, was a skeleton of lines, another a field of white daubs. To create unique textures,…