NHPR: Something Wild : NPR

As we hunker down for the winter weather, we’re frequently too preoccupied with what is in our front yards that we tend not to notice what isn’t there. And short of finding a postcard in your mailbox from a warm exotic location, signed by your friendly neighborhood phoebe, you probably haven’t thought much about the birds that flitted through your yard just months ago. We love to admire the birds when they’re here with us, but we’ve accepted that school-age aphorism that birds fly south for the winter. As if there was some avian Sandals resort, at which birds congregate, sipping margaritas and playing beach volleyball until it’s time to come home. But these birds are not on vacation. New Hampshire is too cold and offers too little food, so most have moved to more hospitable places in order to survive. However, migration is not one-size-fits-all. Different species practice different forms of migration. Ospreys are large raptors that feed almost exclusively on fish. Since the ice that