Category: Birdwatching

_{This YouTube video was produced by the American Bird Conservancy.}

The formidable American Goshawk (Astur atricapillus) is the largest of North America’s “forest hawks,” a subset of raptors which includes the closely related, but smaller, Cooper’s and Sharp-shinned Hawks. It was split from the Northern Goshawk in 2024, along with its counterpart, the Eurasian Goshawk. Long-tailed with short, broad wings, this hawk is built for agile maneuvering while flying through dense undergrowth. As with other birds of prey, the female American Goshawk is larger than the male. An adult female “Gos” is almost as large and heavy as a Red-tailed

_{This YouTube video was produced by the American Bird Conservancy.}

For many years, the beautiful Blue-throated Macaw (Ara glaucogularis) was known to those outside the Beni savanna only through captive specimens, and was thought by some to be extinct in the wild, a victim of the illegal wild bird trade and habitat loss. Local people in the area knew the bird persisted, however, and in 1992, a population of approximately 50 macaws was documented in northeastern Bolivia. The macaws had held out in the “islands” of palm trees that rise above the Beni savanna’s vast, seasonally flooded plains.

The species’

_{This YouTube video was produced by the American Bird Conservancy.}

Every Spring, thousands of Red Knots travel 9,000 miles from South America’s Tierra del Fuego to the Canadian Arctic for their breeding season. With such a long migration, this shorebird must make stops along the way to eat and rest. The Delaware Bay is the perfect pitstop, where the horseshoe crab eggs provide nourishment for the exhausted Red Knots and other migratory shorebirds.

But this essential food source is under threat. Unsustainable harvesting of horseshoe crabs in the Atlantic Coast led to the loss of two thirds of its population