The Science of Birds

This episode is all about how birds choose their mates and the evolutionary outcomes of those choices. A lot of what we’re talking about today has to do with sexual selection, which is a special for...

Birds in the family Scolopacidae include all the world’s sandpipers and birds such as godwits, curlews, snipes, dowitchers, willets, stints, and more. We know these as familiar ‘shorebirds.’ They hau...

Our understanding of bird brains and intelligence has grown tremendously in the last couple decades. Thanks to countless scientific studies, we now know that many bird species are highly intelligent....

The Vermilion Flycatcher (Pyrocephalus rubinus) is a charming bird found in the arid southwest of the United States, as well as in Mexico and down to southern South America. This bright red flycatcher...

Join Ivan as he wades into the conservation quagmire surrounding house cats and their effects on wild birds. First, we’ll look at the status of house cat and feral cat populations around the world....

All about the ‘true’ finches, the species belonging to the family Fringillidae.  These small songbirds are found in many places around the world. Most of them specialize in eating seeds.  Not every bi...

Winter can be a cold, dark time when food is scarce. Birds fight to stay alive during this season by using a variety of behavioral and physiological adaptations. Many of these are the same things you ...

Kingfishers—all the birds in the family Alcedinidae—are the focus of this episode. There are many species of these charismatic birds living across the world. Learn about their key features, global di...

Despite much of human civilization grinding to a halt in 2020, research on birds continued to be published in scientific journals. Through this research, we learned many new things about our avian fr...

This episode focuses on the biological family Anatidae. This family includes the over 150 species of ducks, geese, and swans in the world. First, we highlight the key features shared by these birds,...