10-21: This Month in Birding - May 2026
The American Birding Podcast
naswick
4.7 • 677 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 79 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's the end of May, the season for bald cardinals, baby birds, and buggy birding. But most importantly, it's the last Thursday of the month and that means it's time for This Month in Birding, our monthly panel discussion of bird news and science and we have rounded up another great group of birding friends to have that discussion. Host Nate Swick is joined by Mikko Jimenez, Jordan Rutter, and Brodie Cass Talbott, to talk vagrant birds, robo-grouse, and birdy World Cup crests.
Links to articles discussed in this episode:
When Primm resort-casinos go dark, what happens to the birds?
Students fabricate randy robo-grouse whose strut could save birds at Jackson Hole Airport
Inter- and intra-individual variation in the feather coloration of American crows
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the American Birding podcast from the American Birding Association. I am your host, Nate Swick. It's the end of the month, and that means it's time for a this month in birding episode. I'll get you to it. But first, a reminder that we are in the last few days of our membership drive it ends on May |
| 0:21.9 | 31st. We have reached our goal, so thanks to everyone who helped us accomplish that. But, you know, |
| 0:29.7 | we're going to be overachievers here. It's never a bad time to join the American Birding |
| 0:33.3 | Association, and you can still make our numbers look even better if you join before the end of the |
| 0:38.2 | month. Last reminder, I promise. That's all I've got. I'm not going to make the hard sell. |
| 0:43.1 | Let's get to the fun stuff. Miko Jimenez, Jordan Rudder, and Brody Castelabot |
| 0:47.7 | join me to talk about vagrant science, crow feathers, robo grouse, and more. After this week's, |
| 0:53.7 | well, more like this month's rarebirds. |
| 1:01.2 | This is your rarebird focus for most of May, 2026. |
| 1:06.3 | We've got a lot to cover this week. |
| 1:08.0 | I have missed the last couple episodes for traveling reasons. My bad, |
| 1:13.0 | strap in. It is fork-tailed flycatcher season in the ABA area. The South American breeding |
| 1:18.3 | kingbird is the classic Austroo-migrant, meaning that it is a southern hemisphere breeding |
| 1:23.4 | bird that migrates north towards the equator in the southern hemisphere fall, which is our |
| 1:29.7 | spring. It winters regularly as far north as the Yucatan and frequently overshoots into North America |
| 1:35.1 | at this time of year. That means the species can and has shown up just about anywhere in the U.S. |
| 1:40.7 | in Canada. And spring, 2026 has already seen birds in Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, |
| 1:46.3 | and Maryland. Add to that this week, first records coming from Santa Fe County, New Mexico, |
| 1:52.4 | and the District of Columbia. The New Mexico record is the slightly more unusual one, |
| 1:57.5 | as vagrant records of fork tails are heavily weighted toward the eastern half of the |
| 2:01.8 | continent but as i said it's possible anywhere as records from colorado california and wyoming |
| 2:07.4 | attest other notable spring overshoots include connecticut's first record of swainson's warbler |
... |
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