A close look at one season in one key site that reveals the amazing science and magic of spring bird migration, and the perils of human encroachment.   Every spring, billions of birds sweep north, driven by ancient instincts to return to their breeding grounds. This vast parade often goes unnoticed, except in a few places where these small travelers concentrate in large numbers. One such place is along Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. There, the...

Climate change wasn't on the public's radar in 1995, when Mary Taylor Young and her husband bought their piece of the wild in the Colorado Rockies. They built a cabin, set up a trail of bluebird nest boxes, and began a nature journal of observations. Her twenty-five year journal, she realized, was a record of climate change, happening not on an Antarctic ice sheet but in their own natural neighborhood and echoed in everyone's backyard.