As cold weather sets in and you fill your bird feeders, you’ll find hours of entertainment — and bafflement — in their behavior. What are they up to with all the strutting, head-bobbing, feather-fluffing and wing flapping? Get the answers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, now enrolling backyard birders in the online bird-behavior course Investigating Behavior: Courtship and Rivalry in Birds. Over five weeks, you’ll learn how to observe and interpret bird behavior in...

If there is a manatee swimming in the Middle Branch of the Upper Patapsco, it must be cold. The sub-tropical marine mammal was reported in mid-October. Since then, nothing — despite a plea to boaters for updates. “With this one we haven’t been able to confirm an actual sighting ourselves with photographic evidence,” says Baltimore National Aquarium’s media/public relations director Jen Bloomer. This could be good news: The wayward swimmer could have fled the cold...

April, when we pay our taxes, may be the cruelest month. But winter is the most expensive season. At least it was in 2009-10, when what we saved in autumnal hurricanes was lost in the avalanche of winter snow.  In Maryland alone, last year’s record-setting snow cost American taxpayers $54,699,527.85 — yes, the fed counts down to pennies. That’s how much cash the Federal Emergency Management Agency has shoveled into Maryland to help dig out from under last winter’s...

Migrating to their winter home, tundra swans will soon be filling the gap in the sky left by south-migrating osprey. Our snowbirds could be arriving any day. Most of their 3,000-mile journey south from their homes in Alaska and Canada occurs during November, according to Larry Hindman, the Water Fowl Project Leader of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The birds migrate in family groups. Parents with their young plus teens and non-breeders all fly in the famous V form that most...