Why the Mourning Dove is called that, what American folk beliefs said about its call (rain, love, luck and death), its names in Cherokee, Navajo and Nahuatl, the doves of the Bible, and what modern ...

A Goldcrest's song is a very high, thin run of notes rocking between a higher and a lower pitch, ending in a short flourish; the calls are thin and high. Listen to recordings from Britain, see them as ...

The Red Junglefowl is the wild ancestor of every domestic chicken on Earth — a bird whose crow, cluck, and scratch have shaped human civilisation more than any other. Males are spectacular: a cascade ...

In Christian art the Goldfinch stands for Christ's Passion, and it appears in hundreds of devotional pictures, Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch among them. Here is what it meant, where those ...

No gull on Earth travels further than Sabine's Gull — up to 39,000 km each year between its Arctic breeding grounds and the cold upwellings off Peru and South Africa. With its bold tricoloured wings, ...

A flash of sky-blue streaking across the western mountains signals one of North America's most eye-catching songbirds at work, hovering like a kestrel before diving for insects in the alpine meadows.

Slender, secretive, and built for speed, the Black-billed Cuckoo is a long-distance migrant that travels from the forests of eastern North America to the rainforests of South America each year — and ...

What does a Blue Jay symbolize? The old records make the jaybird the devil's Friday errand-runner, with a few luck and rain omens; Native American stories make it a watcher and boaster; Thoreau and ...

What birds eat in the wild and what to put out for them: diet guides for garden birds, birds of prey, waterbirds and more, ...

This towering wetland dweller, standing up to 6 feet tall, is the world's tallest flying bird and a cultural icon across its Asian range. The Sarus Crane is the tallest flying bird, with a striking ...

A female Northern Cardinal is pale tan-brown with red in her crest, wings and tail and the same red-orange bill as the male. How to identify her, how she differs from the male, why her song matters, ...

Seeds. About 99% of a Mourning Dove's diet is seeds, from crops or wild plants, and the little animal food it takes, mostly snails, is incidental. 1 All About Birds adds that they occasionally eat ...