Birds of North America

A continent connected to Eurasia at its edges

North America spans an immense range of habitat, from Arctic tundra across northern Canada and Alaska through vast boreal forest, prairie grassland, temperate woodland, desert basins, and subtropical wetland in the far south. Much of this diversity belongs to bird families found nowhere else covered in this atlas, but the continent is not entirely separate from the Eurasian bird world featured throughout the Eurasian sections: at its northwestern edge, Alaska sits only a narrow strait away from the Asian Far East, and several species with genuinely circumpolar or near-global ranges bridge the two continents directly.

This overview page focuses on those points of connection before country pages build out North America's own extensive and largely distinct bird fauna in greater depth.

Species shared with the rest of this atlas

The mallard is among the most striking examples of overlap, its native range spanning nearly the entire Northern Hemisphere including large parts of North America, where it remains one of the continent's most familiar and widespread ducks, just as it is across Eurasia. The rock dove, while not native to the Americas, has been introduced so widely and successfully that it is now a familiar sight in virtually every North American city, mirroring its ubiquity across Eurasian urban centers.

Beyond these direct overlaps, several bird families represented in this atlas by Eurasian species have close North American relatives occupying similar ecological roles, a pattern especially visible among waterfowl, raptors, and corvids, even where the specific species themselves differ between continents.

Seasonality

North America's seasonal bird patterns broadly mirror the temperate rhythms familiar from the Eurasian sections of this atlas: spring migration moves north from March through May, often along well-defined corridors known as flyways that funnel huge numbers of migrating birds along coastlines, river valleys, and mountain ranges, with breeding activity concentrated through May and June across most of the continent's temperate latitudes. Autumn migration reverses the pattern from roughly August through October, and the continent's southern reaches, including much of Florida and the Gulf Coast, support substantial wintering populations of species that breed much further north.

Countries of the region in this atlas

The United States opens the country-level coverage — from Arctic-influenced Alaska to subtropical Florida. Alongside it are pages for Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Panama, which together cover the continent's main habitats and migratory flyways.