Laura Erickson's For the Birds Laura Erickson

Laura recalls the birds who inspired her baby daughter's second word.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has created two extremely useful apps for birders. Merlin is wonderful and useful, but far from perfect.

Laura sparked unprecedented anger in a listener last week because of a program and blogpost from 2007. (All my blogpost/transcripts have photos, and some are longer than the program itself, but this program's linked transcript/blogpost has a *lot* more information than I could include in the program, along with pertinent photos and a video.)

*The Birds That Audubon Missed* by Kenn Kaufman is a clear-eyed and surprisingly exciting portrait of a time and place that have long ago disappeared, and an important and timely book as well. Laura can’t recommend it highly enough.

Kenn Kaufman has written an important new book. Laura begins her review by talking about her own personal feelings about Audubon and his work before Kaufman's rich and enlightening book gave her a broader, more truthful picture of a deeply flawed yet important human being and his contemporaries.

Laura's been in love with a pretty little sparrow since she first saw it in 1977.