I spent a year at the University of Toronto reading the epic poem Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon. The prof for that class was Laurence K. Shook, a Basilian priest who had a special interest in the riddles contained in an Old English manuscript called the Exeter Book. These riddles all take the form of short poems in alliterative verse, and none of them comes with a solution. Shook believed several of the riddles referred to birds that were common in England during Anglo-Saxon times.

One evening when Father Shook was talking about the riddles, one of my classmates snickered…

When she stops him on the Rue Royale, she’s wearing a dark veil that makes it impossible to see her face. Even so, he can tell she is “a femelle of a fine form.” She speaks to him in French because she knows it’s his native tongue. Is he the man who draws the birds in black chalk? In fact, she knows quite a bit about him — she’s had him followed for days — and he knows nothing of her.

Yes, he admits to working in that medium. Well in that case, she says, come to such-and-such an address…

All damselflies — the tiny, slimmed-down cousins of dragonflies in the order Odonata — are elegant creatures, but the Fragile Forktail (Ischnura posita) is in a class by itself. Is it the name alone that makes me think so? Fragility can make anything — whether it’s a bug or a piece of furniture — seem more graceful and refined, and the Fragile Forktail’s minute size and extreme thinness often give the impression that it’s only a breath away from expiring.

But for me, its elegance lies more in color than in shape: in the male, a cool, restrained arrangement of…

When I’m outside in early spring, I find myself not so much longing for the sight of something green as lusting after the color yellow. The rich yellow on a Meadowlark’s breast, the goldshine of Dutch Master Daffodils, the whitish-yellow of Forsythia flowers — these slake something so strong that it feels like a physical need, a thirst that’s built up inside me all through winter’s greyness.

But maybe nothing satisfies that thirst better than Bloodroot, a wildflower native to eastern North America, with its stand-up yellow stamens surrounded by the brightest of white petals. My first sight of Bloodroot…

John James Audubon fashioned two portraits of the Great Black-backed Gull, one written, the other painted. He began his written portrait of the largest gull in the world by evoking the terror it inspired in other creatures whenever it took to the wing to hunt.

This apex predator, what Audubon called a “tyrant bird” and “remorseless spoiler,” chased down, killed, and ate whatever it could wrap its outsized bill around. Prey included the eggs and young of nesting seabirds, mammals such as meadow voles and fox kits, and the grouse and other game birds that frequented coastal fields.

Even the…

Most birders I know have a weakness for woodpeckers. It’s partly the drumming that seduces us: that monotone hammering woodpeckers make every spring to claim a territory and find a mate. But it’s also their shape and color. Shape because every part of a woodpecker’s anatomy — bill, skull, ribcage, tail feathers, and feet — has been adapted to its peculiar foraging techniques on the trunks of trees.

I biked down to the Leslie Street Spit the other day to look for winter birds and brought a camera with me in case anything good turned up. “The Spit,” as it’s known in Toronto, is a former landfill in the east end of the city that juts into Lake Ontario for about five kilometers (three miles). A disused lighthouse stands at the far end, and a paved loop road makes cycling an easy affair. Otherwise, the land is covered with habitats that include wetlands, wildflower meadows, and patchy forests of cottonwood, poplar, and birch. …