The 2026 ABA Bird of the Year: Horned Lark!
The 2026 Bird of the Year is the Horned Lark: a widespread, resilient, and fascinating species uniting birders through art, storytelling, and conservation all year long.
2025 ABA Bird of the Year: Common Loon
The Common Loon is our 2025 Bird of the Year! Imagine a clear summer evening in the north woods. Above you, the bands of the Milky Way framed by the dark spindly boughs of spruce and fir. And cutting though the stillness comes an otherworldly laughter. An eerie yodel...
The Golden-winged Warbler Is the ABA’s 2024 Bird of the Year!
by Frank Izaguirre Bee Bzz Bzz Bzz. That’s a sound birders love to hear, and, in some places, one birders hear less often than they used to. Gorgeous, threatened, prone to [...]
Belted Kingfisher, the 2023 ABA Bird of the Year!
In 2023, the ABA honors the Belted Kingfisher, Megaceryle alcyon, as its Bird of the Year! Bold, resolute, and recognizable along much of the ABA Area’s shorelines, look for Belted Kingfisher content throughout the year in all the ABA’s media.
2022 Bird of the Year: Burrowing Owl, Athene cunicularia
The ABA's 2022 Bird of the Year is the Burrowing Owl, arguably the world's most charismatic bird species!
2021 Bird of the Year: Pileated Woodpecker, Dryocopus pileatus
The ABA is proud that the Pileated Woodpecker, emblem of both the wild woods and the adaptability of birds to anthropogenically altered spaces, is our 2021 Bird of the Year.
2020 Bird of the Year: Cedar Waxwing
Famously gregarious, Cedar Waxwings are all about community. They share berries, they congregate at fruiting trees, they even occasionally over-imbibe. Birders, too, are frequently a social bunch.
ABA Bird of the Year 2018: Iiwi
Iiwi (Drepanis coccinea) Introduction by Nate Swick, ABA Blog editor Adult (left) and juvenile Iiwi, as depicted by our 2018 Bird of the Year artist H. Douglas Pratt With Hawaii’s inclusion in [...]
2017 Bird of the Year: Ruddy Turnstone
Ruddy Turnstone (Arenaria interpres) Introduction by Nate Swick, ABA Blog editor Ruddy Turnstones, as depicted by our 2017 Bird of the Year artist Sophie Webb. Travel to a beach just about anywhere [...]
