Waking up to the dawn chorus of birds—one of the natural world's greatest symphonies—is a joy like no other. It is not ...

I was sitting in solitude earlier this summer in an Adirondack chair in my backyard, when I realized I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought. Thanks to the app I’d just downloaded on my phone — the popular ...

NPR's Scott Detrow speaks with Matthew Medler of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology about the best bird sounds of 2025 from their vast collection of recordings, and why their selections made the list.

I’m not a bird watcher, but I’ve become a bird listener ever since downloading a bionic ear app to my phone. It lets me enter a different world, one where I’m surrounded not just by chirping but by ...

If you were old enough to buy CDs in the ’90s, you may remember listening stations at superstores that featured music by some of nature’s noisiest creatures: birds. These CDs blended classical music ...

When you’re birding by ear, you use the same skills as when you’re recognizing music; listening to sounds, patterns, changes in pitch, in tone and in volume, but in nature rather than in music. You ...

Next to insects, birds sadly seem to get short shrift from humans. We remain powerfully drawn to scenes of lions hunting in the Kalahari desert or rhinos jousting in eastern India, but remain mostly ...

The mountains, lakes, deep woods and rugged coastlines of Maine's Acadia National Park are home to more than 300 species of birds. Volunteers are now making recordings to document the avian soundscape ...