My friend Alison, who used to live in Palo Alto, dispatched me on my recent travels to the Baylands, a lovely little park that is, as its name suggests, on the bay. It’s got salt marshes and tidal wetlands and a ton of birds. Being an inland desert dweller, I was in bird overload. A …
What I did on my spring vacation: Lissa and I got the backyard train running (track needed a bit of post-winter sprucing up) We rode the big people train to Santa Fe I got new glasses We got far more work done to the car than I expected Slept in some, but got up early …
From this morning’s paper, a visit to Work Case 82B (sub/ad req) at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, where they keep that which has gone extinct: The Carolina parakeet on the top shelf of Work Case 82B, green with a dingy red head, looks little different from the other 30,000 stuffed …
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I’m having a hard time deciding whether this was the year of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, or of the swimming doves. I’m leaning toward the doves. The sapsucker was a novice birder’s treat. It showed up Dec. 11, a Saturday. I was sitting in my office at the back of the house and saw it flitting …
From the morning paper, an invite to one of New Mexico’s treasures – the Bosque del Apache (sub/ad req): Come for the sandhill cranes and the grand clouds of snow geese. Stay for the coyote, or possibly the American pipit. The big gray cranes and waves of geese are the marquee attraction at the Bosque …
Saw the strangest thing this morning in the pond outside my office at home. The pond’s a round metal stock tank Lissa got me for my 40th birthday. It’s popular with the birds, but never like what I saw this morning – swimming white-winged doves. The picture’s not great. I watched ’em for a while, …
This was the best nighthawk week I’ve had in my yet young birding career. I’ve sort of vaguely watched birds since I was a kid, something I picked up from my mother. When Lissa and I got married, mom and dad passed on their Peterson’s guide, and we made a tradition of taking it with …
Birdwatching in Europe is a whole new deal for me, fabulously entertaining, because pretty much everything I see wherever I go is new. And since I’m a recently minted keeper of lists, it’s also productive. Most of the time I’ve been in Denmark I’ve been working, so I’ve left the binoculars and bird book in …
Seen on the bike today: A new beaver dam taking shape in the riverside drain, just south of the Interstate 40 bridge. A pair of bicycle cops pulling over a cyclist on the riverside trail. (If you ride the trail on the weekends, you know Singing Guy. Wears headphones, sings very loudly and very badly. …
Everywhere I went on my road trip over the last week up the Lower Colorado River, it seemed like the black-necked stilts were following me. I saw them Monday night in the East Yuma Wetlands, a great little habitat restoration project laced with trails on a bend in what’s left of the Colorado River, just upstream …
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