A bird’s crest is made up of a slender array of feathers on top of their head. These feathers are a bit longer and can be spiked up or slicked back, depending on what the bird is trying to communicate. Even birds without crests, like crows or sparrows, sometimes puff up their short crown feathers.

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Sharp-shinned Hawks are swift, bird-catching predators. The male is jay-sized. The female stands a head taller and weighs almost twice as much. Female birds of prey are most notably bigger than males among hawk species that hunt very agile prey, such as other birds. The smaller male will tend to hunt smaller prey. The female takes somewhat larger prey, so together they can tap a wider range of resources.

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Rosemary Moscoe’s latest book is a tongue-in-cheek guide that defines many of the terms that you might hear on a bird outing, like calling a particularly cute bird a "birb" or shortening the word binoculars to just "bins" or "nocs."

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Writer Amy Tan’s work is known all over the world. And thanks to her latest best-seller, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, she’s now also known for her deep love of birds. Tan not only spends time interacting with birds, she also comes up with creative ways to help them.

This episode was produced as part of BirdNote’s From Love to Action Campaign, an effort to inspire one million people to take action to help birds by 2027. To learn more and to tell us how you’re helping birds, visit this link.

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Except around Easter, chicken eggs usually come in a predictable range of colors: white, brown, and sometimes pale blue or green. Chickens are descended from the Red Jungle Fowl of Southeast Asia, which has been providing eggs for humans for thousands of years. The final color of an egg comes from a pigment the hen’s body adds to the shell just before the egg is laid. Breeds that lay white eggs don’t add any pigment.

Today's show brought to you by the Bobolink Foundation.

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Piping Plovers are tiny, sand-colored shorebirds that nest on the beach. They’re threatened in much of their range. But plovers have gotten a boost from something rather surprising: hurricanes. Superstorm Sandy left behind plant-free, sandy beaches on barrier islands in New York and New Jersey, which actually offers better camouflage for nesting plovers. Where these hurricane-created habitats were protected, Piping Plovers have boomed.

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