Backyard Birds Revealed Puts America’s Favorite Birds in the Spotlight

The Backyard Birds Revealed video series is sponsored by Wild Birds Unlimited. One episode is online now; four others will launch in January 2026.

Over the years we’ve traveled far abroad on wildlife photography assignments to document some of the world’s most exotic birds—spending days perched 100 feet high in a tree blind in the New Guinea rainforest canopy to photograph birds-of-paradise, and sweating it out in the Indonesian jungle to film hornbills.

One day back at home in Massachusetts, we had a curious thought: What could we reveal if we trained our state-of-the-art digital cameras on the beloved titmice, chickadees, and woodpeckers in our backyard?

That idea hatched into a new web series with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and sponsored by Wild Birds Unlimited. Over five episodes, we turn the spotlight on common birds, using some of our favorite cinematography tools—super slow-motion, extreme close-ups, unorthodox camera angles—to reveal the details of birds’ lives that backyard birders don’t see with the naked eye.

By the time filming wrapped on the fifth episode, it was one of the most fun and rewarding shoots we can remember—here’s a taste of what we got.

A Ballet in the Air

Titmice and chickadees are such fun birds to watch as they make their busy visits to our feeders. But they move so fast it’s hard to fully grasp how skillful their flying is. When our 1,000-frames-per-second camera slowed down the action, we could see the whole ballet of intricate motions involved in landing at the feeder. These little birds turn their bodies vertically in mid-air and almost fly backwards, braking with their tail and using their long legs as shock absorbers to stop on a dime …or at a sunflower seed. At super-slo-mo frame-by-frame, we could see how each feather in the wing works in concert, and came to understand the whirl of motion we see every day.

Two Ways to Climb a Tree

Woodpeckers always face upwards, while nuthatches face every which way on the tree trunk. It’s something a birder notices when watching these birds in the forest. To better understand how their movements differed, we mounted special wide-angle cameras right along the tree trunks in our yard. As a White-breasted Nuthatch zigzagged by, we noticed how perfectly centered its little round body is over its legs. Short tail out of the way, it maneuvers using long claws to grip the bark. For nuthatches, agility is the name of the game as they search every crevice for food, whether head up or head down. Woodpeckers, on the other hand, are all about power. They have a unique tripod stance, facing up and leaning away from the tree on long stiff tail feathers, then pulling with their strong legs and bill to whack into the wood and get at beetle larvae inside the bark, where no other birds can reach.

Cavity Curious

In a forest, woodpecker holes are a valuable commodity. Species that utilize tree cavities but can’t make their own holes—such as titmice, nuthatches, and bluebirds—need them for nesting [see The Hole Story, Spring 2025]. We placed our small, wide-angle cameras near a tree cavity to get up close and personal and see which birds would drop by to conduct an inspection. Then we had fun creating our own artificial cavity with a back-door camera looking out from inside the nest hole. The resulting images showed cavity-curious birds playing peek-a-boo. If you’ve ever noticed a bird pausing in its daily routine to stick its head inside a tree cavity, it was probably browsing the local real estate.

Feeder Skirmishes

Some of our most exciting footage came from watching birds jockey for position at the feeder. Using our super-slo-mo camera we captured some intense altercations that looked way more dramatic than we could see at normal speed. Tufted Titmice were some of the most exciting to watch—their crests are so expressive as the birds signal whether they intend to stand their ground or are just bluffing. In one skirmish two titmice faced off with crests fully raised; they meant business. The titmouse flying into the feeder was hoping to drive off its rival, but its sleeked-back crest says it wasn’t 100% certain. Sure enough, the perched titmouse drove the new arrival away almost before it landed—in an acrobatic, twisting dive that took our breath away when we watched the action in slow motion.