The best part of doing this story was standing by the Rio Grande at dusk with Chris Witt, watching the sandhill cranes fly in to roost. The birds were great, but the really extraordinary part was watching Chris watch them – eyes flitting, counting, listening and hearing. As they flew by, they announced their presence …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere about deceptive bird sex’ »
Sorry, can’t resist posting one more hummingbird picture. The rufous, on the left, have just finally arrived at our house. They’re usually earlier in the summer, and they’re very aggressive, driving away the black-chins who have been here since late spring. Moments after this picture was snapped, the rufous drove the black-chin away:
From this morning’s newspaper, a column about a day with a research team studying the Cooper’s hawks that are making an increasingly comfortable living around my city: Cooper’s hawks are primarily woodland birds, and we have built an expansive urban forest across the Northeast Heights. The urban neighborhoods on the east side of the river …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere – the Cooper’s hawks of Albuquerque’ »
Five years ago, Lissa and I stopped to talk to a ranger on the Petroglyph Point Trail at Mesa Verde. We’d been admiring the turkey vultures soaring above the canyon, and the ranger clued us in. If you like turkey vultures, she told us, go to the Spruce Tree House overlook at dusk tonight and …
This is our 21st spring in the house on Aliso Drive, the longest (by a significant margin) that I’ve lived in the same place. The utility pole in the back corner of our yard has been at the fringe of my perception that whole time. I never completely ignored it, but I never thought much …
One more from yesterday’s road trip to the Bosque del Apache, the National Wildlife Refuge 90 minutes’ drive south of Albuquerque. As I’ve written before, snow goose overpopulation is an ecological disaster. But when they take flight? Yowza.