Birds

Exhibitions

Girls looking in a drawer at a fossil as a couple in background looks at birds in case

Exhibition | NHM

Hall of Birds

A rare opportunity to get up close with hundreds of species of birds

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A group of birds make use of the feeds at the Museum's bird watching platform

Wildlife Viewing

Take a break and watch some of the animals that visit our Nature Gardens.

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A swallowtail butterfly on purple verbena

Welcome wildlife to your garden

Some tips and tricks.

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Events

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Visitors looking up, holding binoculars to their eyes

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Tours & Activities

Nature Gardens Exploration

Enjoy NHM’s one-of-a-kind Nature Gardens while learning more about urban wildlife. Visitors of all ages are welcome to stop by anytime during the hour and stay as long or short as you’d like!

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weekly

11:00 am

Saturdays and Sundays

Opossum on a stick sculpture with an audience in the background

nhm

Tours & Activities

Meet a Live Animal

Get up close and personal with the Museum's resident animals! Hear amazing stories about critters that are often misunderstood or overlooked.

Learn more

daily

3:00 pm

nhm

Tours & Activities

Nature Gardens Exploration

Enjoy NHM’s one-of-a-kind Nature Gardens while learning more about urban wildlife. Visitors of all ages are welcome to stop by anytime during the hour and stay as long or short as you’d like!

Learn more

weekly

11:00 am

Saturdays and Sundays

nhm

Tours & Activities

Meet a Live Animal

Get up close and personal with the Museum's resident animals! Hear amazing stories about critters that are often misunderstood or overlooked.

Learn more

daily

3:00 pm

nhm

Tours & Activities

Meet a Live Animal

Get up close and personal with the Museum's resident animals! Hear amazing stories about critters that are often misunderstood or overlooked.

Learn more

daily

3:00 pm

Stories

A paradise tanager looks directly into a camera with its green head cocked, visible red spot on its back, and stunningly bright blue breast.

Hidden black and white feathers are the secret behind songbirds' dazzling colors

Colorful songbirds like tanagers use a painterly technique to make their colors pop

Vintage illustration of various feathers and specimen skins of birds

How Bird Feathers Work

A brief look at the structure of feathers—and what they mean to birds

An silhouette of a bird filled with naming words like 'black' 'western' etc

A First Step to Bird Names as Simple as ABC

First-of-its-kind Avian Lexicon Atlas maps how bird species get their names

Illustration of ice age bird, the teratorn.

Meet Teratorn, the Largest Bird Found at La Brea Tar Pits

The teratorn was undoubtedly big, but was it a big vulture or something else?

A male house finch with a little red plumage around its beak and breast alongside otherwise gray feathers being held still by a person's hand

Bird banding, Wildfire Smoke, and the Nature Gardens

Researchers band birds and collect feathers in the Nature Gardens to study the impacts of wildfire smoke on birds.

Wildfire Smoke in Bird Feathers

NHM researchers look at dirty feathers to understand the effects of wildfire smoke on birds

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NHM Virtual Field Trip

Night of Ideas 2020 - Animal Meet and Greet with Leslie Gordon

NHMLAC Discovery Talk with Leslie Gordon

Meet Leslie Gordon, our Manager of Vertebrate Living Collections, and watch her share what her team has been up to during the museum's temporary closure, including telemedicine and museum walkabouts.

DIY Bird Feeder

DIY Bird Feeder: Attract birds to your garden by building your own bird feeder.

Comedero Para Pájaros

Comedero Para Pájaros: Atraiga pájaros a su jardín construyendo su propio comedero para pájaros.

Ornithology

Ornithology, the study of birds, is one of the founding disciplines of the Natural History Museum. At the core of the program is a research collection of 121,000 bird specimens, representing over 5,400 species. Our collections are particularly strong for North America, Africa, South America, and the Pacific Ocean.

News & Press

Hidden layers of white and black feathers are the secret to songbirds' dazzling, colorful plumage

Vibrant songbirds share a technique with painters: using white and black (feathers) to make their colors pop, NHM scientist finds

The exceptionally rare fossil skull of a new bird species from the Age of Dinosaurs reveals that avian skulls achieved their recognizably modern shape using archaic structures—an unexpected but stunning example of parallel evolution—while also unearthing a missing link in the long evolutionary history of the bird brain.