The Bobolink: A Dark Secret of America's Happiest Bird

For over 150 years, poets called it the happiest bird in the meadow. They left out the part where it flies 12,500 miles a year and carries a fleck of iron inside its own skull. This is the bobolink: the black-and-white "backwards tuxedo" songbird of the northern hayfields, and one of the toughest endurance migrants in the New World. We follow one through a full year, from a hidden nest in the grass all the way to the pampas of Argentina and back. Enjoyed this one? We do a full yearlong life cycle for a different bird every week: https://www.youtube.com/@WingsandWond... Along the way: why the male wears a tuxedo inside out, how a single nest can have more than one father, the hayfield-mowing trap that decides the bird's whole year, the double molt that swaps its entire body of feathers twice, the iron-and-star compass it navigates by, and the dark history of the "ricebird" that got more than 720,000 of them shot in one state in 1912. Plus why this once-abundant grassland bird is quietly vanishing today, and the simple fix that still works.