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, ...

Seen a bird and not sure what it is? Take a photo and Birdfact tells you what it is, and how to tell it from the bird it’s often mistaken for.

Woodpeckers are common birds in many parts of the world. They have adapted to live in a huge variety of habitats, and many species are quite at home around our suburbs and even cities. Have you ever ...

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 ...