Birds of North America

TV-G | Documentary | 2 seasons | 21 episodes

This is not your grandfather’s birdwatching. Jason Ward takes viewers through NYC and other cities around the country meeting birders and bird enthusiasts of all kinds.

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Season 1

Episode 1

Warbler Migration in Central Park

Bronx native and bird-lover Jason Ward visits Central Park “the best place in North America to see migrating birds” where he joins thousands of warblers and compares the sound of a rose-breasted grosbeak to the squeak of rubber on a basketball court.

Episode 2

How to Use Binoculars

Jason delivers a beginner’s course in using a birder’s most important tool.

Episode 3

The Ward Brothers & The Morning Warbler

Jason’s younger brother, Jeffrey, is also a birder, and when they head to Central Park together, their competitive instincts get triggered. The duo discuss their “spark” birds and compare notes on what it’s really like to bird while black.

Episode 4

The Birds of the American Museum of Natural History

Jason visits New York’s AMNH, where collections manager Paul Sweet gives him a look at one of the largest avian assortments in the world, which includes specimens of the extinct passenger pigeon, as well as parrots, owls, and peregrine falcons.

Episode 5

Peregrine Falcons at Cape May

Jason throws himself into the joyful mayhem of New Jersey Audubon’s Fall Festival at the Cape May Bird Observatory, where he meets birding legend Pete Dunne and a married couple who moved into a van to become full-time, mobile birders.

Episode 6

Yellow-Billed Cuckoos & The Internet of Wildlife

In Cape May, New Jersey, Jason witnesses songbirds battling howling winds, meets a team of migration researchers who outfit birds with high-tech GPS trackers, and gets up close and personal with the highly secretive yellow-billed cuckoo.

Episode 7

Drew Lanham: Hope Is the Thing With Feathers

Dr. Drew Lanham is a poet and a professor of wildlife ecology who writes and speaks about his love for the outdoors, and about being a birder of color. Drew and Jason discuss how people with different experiences can “find common cause in a bird.”

Episode 8

John James Audubon & The Gang of Warblers

Birds are big in Harlem. Jason checks out the Audubon Mural Project, which has blanketed the northern Manhattan neighborhood with 314 large-scale paintings of birds under threat from climate change and human industry.

Episode 9

Wyatt Cenac & The Bufflehead

Jason shows comedian Wyatt Cenac (aka Wyatt Cenac, The Daily Show) the basic birding ropes in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where Wyatt asks the important questions, like: do birds go “people-ing”?

Episode 10

Feminist Birding With the Northern Flicker

Jason and Jeffrey spend the day identifying birds in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge with New York’s burgeoning Feminist Bird Club, which embraces diversity in birds and humans.

Episode 11

Holiday Birding & The Kingfisher

Jason and Jeffrey join The Birdist blog’s Nicholas Lund and writer and cartoonist Rosemary Mosco for a Christmas bird count in Maine, where they spot great blue herons, American tree sparrows, and large men with firearms.

Episode 12

Jason vs the Birdist

Is the Central Park Mandarin duck the Trump of birds? Should you share your owl sightings, or keep them to yourself? Jason and Nicholas Lund, aka The Birdist, debate some of birding’s most contentious topics.

Episode 13

The Ward Brothers & The Great Black Hawk

Jason and his brother Jeffrey wrap up their trip to Maine with a glimpse of a bird that’s almost never been spotted in the United States: the great black hawk, a native of Central and South America.

Season 2

Episode 1

Jonathan Franzen and the Magic Hedge

Jason meets up with celebrated novelist and passionate birder Jonathan Franzen in Chicago, where they discuss how Franzen’s impressive personal bird count (around 4,600 species!) influenced his views on climate change.

Episode 2

Jason's First Bird Tattoo

In this episode, Jason visits a tattoo shop in Forest Park, Georgia, for his first experience getting inked. As he goes under the needle for a beautiful rendering of his favorite bird, Jason opens up about one of most difficult periods of his life.

Episode 3

Kim & Kenn & The Tennessee Warbler

Every spring, scores of migrating warblers and other songbirds descend on northwest Ohio. While visiting Magee Marsh, Jason meets power couple Kimberly and Kenn Kaufman and finds out what brought them to birds, and to each other.

Episode 4

The Big Metal Birds of LAX

Birders aren’t the only folks with expensive lenses and their heads angled upwards. In this very special episode, Jason heads to California to meet another group of flight obsessives: the plane spotters and aviation photographers of LAX.

Episode 5

Birding While Brown in the Angeles Forest

He’s from the East Coast. They’re from the West Coast. In this episode, Jason teams up with two Audubon colleagues from the LA area for an excursion outside the city and frank conversations about their experiences of birding while brown.

Episode 6

Lili Taylor and the House Sparrow

What do house sparrows and predatory NYC real estate developers have in common? In this episode, acclaimed actress and Brooklyn resident Lili Taylor and Jason talk birding, acting and defense of one’s home turf.

Episode 7

The Wild Bird Fund's Urban Aviary

Jason takes a visit to the Wild Bird Fund, an organization that rehabilitates thousands of injured birds each year. He meets a Common Loon, an American Kestrel, and accompanies a WBF staffer to release a group of pigeons back into the wild.

Episode 8

Young Birders of the Buckeye State

Jason meets the keen-eyed members of the Ohio Young Birders Club—one of the first youth birding groups in the country—and finds out what it’s like to be a teenage bird nerd.

Credits

Cast: Jason Ward, Jonathan Franzen, Drew Lanham, Wyatt Cenac
Director: Rob Meyer
Executive Producer: Ryan Chanatry, Jennie Bedusa, Anna Holmes
Editor: Jennifer Suhr
Producer: Marco Torre