It’s like waiting for a geyser to erupt … or an eclipse. There’s a start time to this endeavor. At 6:45p, we’re told, a North American beaver or two (or more) will swim into this stew of lily pads and systematically take them down for dinner. They have a lodge not far away, this family of…
The White and the Blue [Birds]
First there was Blue. She came to us from the great blue, the wild blue, as blue as Lightin’ Slim, singing pigeon blues, not Rooster Blues. She came on banded foot, born of two other Blues who gave our Blue her azul feathers and fuchsia feet … in a lineage that swept back through the…
Gull Chicks and Gateway Birds
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to…
Clever, Corrugated Starlings
With starlings, I am often an outlier, even among people who share my conservation ethics and love for wildlife. That’s because I appreciate starlings in a way that defies conventional dislike for the species in the United States. I wrote about this in a 2009 post about European Starlings and their introduction to the U.S….
A Pelagic Housewarming Gift
I should stop making excuses for shooting in damp, dark conditions. It is, after all, the Pacific Northwest. But, well … I was shooting in damp, dark conditions, standing on the car deck of a Washington State Ferry at Anacortes, in an ISO 5000 drizzle. Hugh — who’s become a better bird spotter than I…
Great Blue Resilience
A few weeks ago, I walked by the Great Blue Heron rookery a short distance from our place. I expected to see the six or eight heron couples, draped over their nests in anticipation of egg hatching … or maybe even the first raspy calls of young chicks rustling in the alders. Instead, this is…
The Sandpiper Trail at Grays Harbor NWR
Last month, Hugh and I took a spontaneous and soggy photo walk through Grays Harbor National Wildlife Refuge in Hoquiam, Washington. For a few weeks at the end of April and beginning of May, hundreds of thousands of migrating sandpipers, Dunlins, plovers, dowitchers and Red Knots feed and rest on the Refuge’s mud flats and…
The Red-Winged Way
The Red-Wing Blackbird The wild red-wing black- bird croaks frog- like though more shrill as the beads of his head blaze over the swamp and the odors of the swamp vodka to his nostrils ~ William Carlos Williams I notice spring birds before spring buds … and just the other day, the Red-winged Blackbirds were…
She’s a Hum Dum Dinger Pigeon
A little Rock Pigeon (Columba livia) courtship play … photographed on the Seattle waterfront, in the magic hour of a winter evening. Music by Jimmie Davis – in the public domain Photographed with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 + Lumix 100-300mm (micro four thirds) • Edited in iMovie
Rafts of Dreaming Birds
I stepped out of a mist and I knew I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, ‘But what have I been before?’ And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things; I was just one thing among many things.” ~ Carl Jung,…
