A collection
Waterbirds
The birds that live where the water meets the air — herons, loons, and the long lineage of species that fish, dive, wade, and call across northern lakes and southern marshes.
Waterbirds are united less by family than by a shared interface: they make their living at the boundary between water and air. Some wade — herons stalking the shallows. Some dive — loons disappearing into 200-foot black water. Some hunt from the surface and some from below. They drive ecosystems the way wolves drive forests, regulating fish populations and signaling water quality more reliably than most laboratory tests. When the loons leave a lake or the herons abandon a marsh, the water itself has usually changed first.
