Bring Birds Back
Episodes
Hunting Is for the Birds (Too)
17 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Duck hunting may sound like a forbidden sport for most bird lovers but did you know that some of the most dedicated bird conservationists - in the wor...
Chicago’s Windy City Bird Lab
10 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Chicago has been in the spotlight quite a lot as of late, but one of its most remarkable attributes can be seen in the night sky: nocturnal bird migra...
Attack on the Endangered Species Act
03 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this season 8 premiere, host Deja Perkins returns with legislative strategist from the American Bird Conservancy, Hardy Kern. Hardy shares the hi...
✨ Bring Birds Back Season 8 ✨
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The season 8 premiere of Bring Birds Back starts Wednesday, December 3rd! With our returning host, Dr. Deja Perkins, we’re deep diving into policy, ...
Radical Joy with Dr. J. Drew Lanham
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Ornithologist, poet and MacArthur Fellow, Dr. J. Drew Lanham, speaks with host Billy Almon in our season 7 finale! The two begin by talking about Dr...
The Climate Crisis is at Home
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What’s a climate crisis without acknowledgment of an emergency? In conversation with guests Dr. Rose Abramoff and Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, host Ani...
Birdsong and Speech with Dr. Erich Jarvis
20 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host Anika Hazra speaks with tenured professor and leading voice in neuroscience, Dr. Erich Jarvis! Erich, who has spent decades researching the neura...
Indigenous Water Justice
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Host Billy Almon speaks with Indigenous water scientist, legal scholar and advocate Dr. Kelsey Leonard. Kelsey incorporates both her Indigenous knowle...
Restoration Ecology: The Birds and the Trees
06 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Meet your co-host, Anika Hazra! Anika is a former restoration ecologist turned science communicator, and in this episode, she’s teaching us all abou...
Biomimicry, Birds and Beyond with adrienne maree brown
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On this season premiere episode, meet your new co-host, Billy Almon! Billy is an astrobiofuturist (which you’ll hear more about later), and one of h...
✨ Season 7 of Bring Birds Back Coming Soon! ✨
23 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bring Birds Back, is back... and we’ve got two new co-hosts, Billy Almon and Anika Hazra! They'll be sharing their own personal knowledge and passio...
Let’s Talk About Bird Flu
06 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Avian flu, better known as bird flu, has been in news headlines all summer of 2024. Still, many questions remain for the general public. What is it? W...
Backyard Birding with Project Feederwatch
16 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Since 1976, Project Feederwatch has been through many changes and iterations. But what has remained is the dedication to collecting data that undeniab...
Putting Neotropical Ornithology on the Map
02 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 2023, over 120 contributors published a study in the scientific journal, Ornithological Applications, about a long history of exclusion Latin Ame...
Making the Windy City Safer for Birds
18 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On October 5, 2023, thousands of migrating songbirds died after crashing into the McCormick Place Convention Center in downtown Chicago and surroundin...
Building Community for BIPOC Birders
04 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Historically, birding spaces aren’t known to show diverse faces, races and even genders. But for the Chicago BIPOC Birders group, co-founder Daniela...
The Forgotten Flock: Female Birds
21 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How much do you know about the lives of female birds? And could you identify, say, a male Scarlet Tanager from a female? This episode’s host and co-...
Bring Birds Back Season 6
14 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Join us every other Wednesday for a new episode of Bring Birds Back! Meet this season’s co-hosts Deja Perkins and Purbita Saha, and learn about a wi...
A Will and a Wildway
07 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever worried you’d hit a wild animal while driving down a highway or country road? In this special season closer, we learn about a new an...
Stone-Cold Hydrilla
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
25 years ago, a mysterious cause of eagle and osprey deaths plagued a small town in Arkansas. And in this special episode, we get to the root of it al...
Your River’s Keeper
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Water is essential for life, but how much do you know about the health of your local water supply? In this special episode, we speak with two Riverkee...
The Noise Report
17 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this special episode, we explore the critical effects of noise pollution on both humans and birds. Dr. Erica Walker offers an insightful view of ho...
Time, Age and Climate Change with Bill McKibben
05 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This season has been all about the mutual impact birds, humans and nature have on each other. To close it out, Bill McKibben joins Tenijah for an hone...
Reimagining Prison Pt. 2: Rehabilitating Butterflies and Minds
28 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This is part two of our series on the Sustainability in Prisons Project. If you haven’t heard part one already, we encourage you to listen to that f...
Reimagining Prison Pt. 1: Acoustic Birding and Sustainability
21 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The American prison system is complex and there are so many reasons as to why and how it could be improved. For nearly two decades, the Sustainability...
Finding Belonging in the Great Outdoors
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Nature author, photographer and self-taught birder Dudley Edmondson shares how embracing the great outdoors as a child changed his life for the better...
Let’s All Go to Gullah Geechee Sea Islands with Isaiah Scott
07 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
This episode’s guest may be too young to remember the 90’s children’s show, Gullah Gullah Island, but he’s certainly influencing the next gene...
No Birds Were Harmed in the Making of this Podcast
31 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Childhood nostalgia, anyone? Tenijah reminisces about her favorite bird moment in a film and learns all about how it came to be! Our guest this episod...
A.I. for Birds: A Lesson on Wind Farms
24 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days – for better or for worse. Luckily, in the case of our feathered friends, it’s good news! In th...
The Zero Sum of it All with Corina Newsome
17 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the season 4 premiere, we’re joined by wildlife advocate, ornithologist and (social media star) birder, Corina Newsome! Tenijah speaks with Corin...
Bird Love Language
14 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Love is in the air and we’re not talking about your $4.99 Valentine’s Day balloon! For this special episode of Bring Birds Back, we dive into all ...
This is Your Brain on Birds
23 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In order for us to show up for birds, we must first show up for ourselves. Our show is all about ways we can help our bird friends, but today we’re ...
The Birds and the Trees
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Clark’s Nutcracker and the whitebark pine have a strong mutualistic relationship: the tree is the bird’s best source of food, and the bird is the ...
The Fascinating World of Bird Behavior
09 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since Tenijah began birding, a lot of questions have come up about why birds do some of the strange things that they do. Writer and biologist Wenfei T...
The Streaming Sanctuary
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Maya Higa is a 24 year old streamer, falconer, and sole founder of Alveus Sanctuary, a wildlife reserve outside of Austin, TX. What's unusual about Al...
Spooky Birds That Squawk in the Dark
26 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For Halloween, corvid researcher Kaeli Swift joins Tenijah for a show-and-tell of spooky birds. Corvids, vultures, and owls all have reputations as om...
Birding on the Hill
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
So many of the challenges facing birds are systemic, bigger than what any one person can fix — so how do we get governments to step in and do someth...
Bird Heroes
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tenijah has been on a birding journey since she was drawn into bird watching at the start of the pandemic — and now, she’s inspiring new birders w...
Birding is for Every Body
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
People with disabilities often face barriers to birding. These can be infrastructural and cultural. The organization Birdability is addressing those b...
How to Be a More Ethical Birder
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since her bird journey began, Tenijah’s been learning how to be a better birder —but not just with new birding skills. There’s also the importan...
Finding Your Flock
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If we want as many people caring for birds as possible, we need people to not only become interested, but to have mentorship and community available f...
The Past, Present, and Future of Purple Martins
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Purple Martins and people have a long history. Native Americans started a practice of providing homes for the birds, which was copied by European colo...
What's in a Name?
01 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Names have power. In North America, more than 100 species of birds have eponymous names, many honoring white colonizers. The “Bird Names for Birds”...
Lights Out
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Migratory birds use starlight to find their way on their long journeys — which makes light pollution a serious threat. Drawn off course by bright, a...
The Bird Journey Continues!
18 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tenijah got hooked on birding at the start of the pandemic, and during the last season of Bring Birds Back she learned a lot about our feathered frien...
How Can We Protect Birds From Plastics?
25 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our season finale, Tenijah to Tybee Island off the Georgia coast for a day at the beach... picking up trash. She joins Tim Arnold, founder of Tybee...
How Can Coffee Help Birds?
11 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Host Tenijah Hamilton hears firsthand from coffee grower Oswaldo Acevedo in Colombia how shade-grown coffee farms offer better wildlife habitat and wo...
How Can Native Plants Help Birds?
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Host Tenijah Hamilton joins volunteers from Georgia Audubon and Trees Atlanta who are planting wildflowers and grasses along an urban rail trail, wher...
For Birds to Win, Do Cats Have to Lose? – Part 2
14 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The second of this two-part segment pulls apart the issues with cats and birds. Host Tenijah Hamilton gets an overview of how outdoor cats affect bird...
For Birds to Win, Do Cats Have to Lose? – Part 1
30 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The first of this two-part episode pulls apart the issues with cats and birds. Producer Mark Bramhill gives Tenijah an overview of how outdoor cats ...
Can We Make Our Cities Safer For Birds?
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tenijah talks with NYC Audubon Senior Conservation Biologist Kaitlyn Parkins and Seattle Audubon Urban Conservation Manager Joshua Morris to break dow...
Who Is Birding For?
02 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the second installment of Bring Birds Back, host Tenijah Hamilton and Sheridan Alford, co-founder of Black Birders Week, talk about how to celebrat...
How Do We Know that Birds are in Trouble?
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the inaugural episode of Bring Birds Back, host Tenijah Hamilton gets to know biostatistician Dr. Adam C. Smith, coauthor of the study that found w...