My bird of the week (bird of the day?) is the Lazuli bunting, a lovely little blue seed-eater that showed up at the feeder this morning. According to both Sibley and the Cornel bird site, we live at or just beyond the southern edge of Lazuli bunting’s summer range, so what we’ve really got here …
I’m not a serious birder, but I’ve gotten totally hooked lately on eBird. I heard about it from Chris Witt, the UNM ornithologist I wrote about last month. It’s run by Cornell and the Audubon Society, and provides a platform for birders to enter their observations. It makes it easy to keep your lists, and …
meadowlarks and $4 gas
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 …
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 …
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)
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …