The American Birding Podcast

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 …

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 k…

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 Bir…

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 b…

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 Duberste…

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 populatio…

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, som…

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 fro…

February brings an all-star lineup to This Month in Birding, with long-time friends Jody Allair, Nick Lund, and Jordan Rutter joining us to talk about all manner of birdy topics. The panel discuss th…

The broader birding community was first introduced to Christian Cooper though the documentary The Central Park Effect, where he featured as one of eclectic crew of Central Park birders. Since then, h…

It's time to talk 2024 ABA Area Rarities! This episode is our annual attempt to look back on all the exciting rare bird observations and trends of the previous year. It ended up being a very good yea…

We love a good field guide around these parts. The more unique, the better.  Phil Chaon and Iain Campbell have certainly done that with their new book, Habitats of North America; A Field Guide for Bi…

Welcome to the new year! For this month's This Month in Birding, we welcome an all star panel of naturalists and writers to talk about the month's bird news. Rebecca Heisman, Dexter Patterson, and S…

For many of us, an interest in birds and nature started with an interest in dinosaurs. Which is approriate since that's the path modern birds took when they became birds. We still don't know a lot ab…

It's cold outside and that calls for some hot birding takes. We've collected some for another edition of Take It or Leave It, the discussion panel for the most opinionated birders. This time we welco…

Modern optics give birders the opportunities to feel as though they are up close and personal with the bird we watch, but nothing we experience through binoculars compares to the experience with bird…

2025 is the year of the Common Loon here at the American Birding Association! Our 2025 Bird of the Year artist, Sam Zimmerman, gets to appreciate these birds frequently from his home in northern Minn…

Thanks for another great year here at the American Birding Podcast. To close out 2024 we host another This Month in Birding panel featuring Jennie Duberstein, Mikko Jimenez, and Brodie Cass Talbott w…

Roughly a quarter of chocolate sales in the US and the UK occur around the holidays at the end of the year. And if you are listening to this podcast, you are statistically almost certain to be partic…

It's the Birding Book Club's biggest meeting of the year!. We're back again to do our annual Best Bird Books of the Year episode for 2024. There’s no better time to give the gift of bird books to the…