stuff I wrote elsewhere
meadowlarks and $4 gas
Archive of posts filed under the birds category.
Birds
stuff I wrote elsewhere: You will see them most any evening these days in Chris Witt’s Albuquerque backyard: the darting, diving, buzzing hummingbird and the aloof nighthawk, feasting on insects in the dim distance. If you were building the bird family tree, you would have no reason to think the two were close kin. But …
The Chimney Dove
Last week, Lissa heard a sound in our chimney. Faint flapping. A bird had somehow become stuck. For days, she tried figure out how to free it, tortured by its grim fate. She tried using a broom to shoo it down into the living room, banishing Sadie so she wouldn’t eat the poor creature if …
Adapt or Die
From the BBC: Great tits cope well with warming: Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars. (via Belshaw)
Great Blue Heron
Back in the late ’80s, Lissa and I were camped along the lower Colorado River somewhere near Blythe. It was winter, but it’s always warm there. Out in the middle of the river, on an island, we watched an enormous bird, just sitting. The bird book and binoculars suggested a great blue heron. Our old …
A Flying Village
I stopped on the bike ride today, down by the river, to watch and listen to an enormous flight of sandhill cranes, headed north. I played a bit with the words to describe it (I often “write” while I’m on the bike), but I didn’t come up with anything quite as crisp as Laura Paskus’s …
Hawks at the park
Cropped hawk photo Originally uploaded by mjhinton. Among other things while we were gone, Mark Justice Hinton got this fabulous picture of a hawk at our neighborhood park.
Water in the Desert
John_Sadie Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa and I took Sadie for a walk this morning to the ponds out in the bosque beyond Tingley Beach. They were finished in 2005, and are really starting to grow up. Baby cottonwoods line the edge, with cattails growing like bonkers at the southern end. We saw what we …
Bees
squirrelOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Some random notes arising from cleaning off my desk and related spaces in my brain. Not sure this hangs together, but I need to put it somewhere so I can get on with my afternoon: Walking this morning with Lissa and Sadie along Embudo Arroyo, a concrete arroyo in Albuquerque’s Northeast …
Daybook
birds: For the first time I can remember, two hummingbirds in an uncomfortable detente, sharing our front porch feeder. A third hovered in the distance, out by the daylilies. Why can’t we all just get along? paper of the day: For reasons that will eventually become clear – Holocene Vegetation in Chaco Canyon, by a …