Winter, the season with cold, snow, short days and long nights, can be a challenging season to explore the National Park System. Yet it also holds surprises that reveal themselves in shimmering lights darting across the night sky, in tracks of what passed the night before across the snowscape, and in congregations of wildlife.

Photographing birds help flesh out the story of a national park or protected land you visit. Those photos also teach you something about bird life and their environment. You don’t have to be a hardcore birder or an expert in avian photography to photograph birds. Photographer Rebecca Latson provides tips and examples of birds she’s captured on the fly (pun intended) in this month’s photography column, with the aim of helping you and your camera capture your own cool national park bird shots.

While it's long been thought the Rocky Mountains lost all their glaciers during the early Holocene warming, research now suggests that those in the Tetons of western Wyoming might have simply gone dormant under debris fields.

As nice as it might be, the federal government does not fully fund all the needs and challenges the National Park Service faces. And that's where friends groups, cooperating associations, and even for-profit businesses come into play. Some of those organizations even help National Parks Traveler bring news and features about the park system to these pages every day of the year.