Mike in the Wild

It's hot in Phoenix.  And with the advent of monsoon season, it's not even the mythically-tolerable dry heat you read about.  As a result, even when we desert denizens rise before the blazing sun, the humidity makes outdoor activities uncomfortably sweaty.  But with our air-conditioned gyms closed during the COVID-19 crisis many of us are still nonetheless dedicated to our morning jogs and walks for outdoor exercise.  In this process, I've discovered that daybreak is also the perfect time to find nighthawks hunting insects.  I was running along the Arizona Canal, near the temporarily-shuttered Biltmore Resort, when I noticed especially large swallows darting a few dozen feet above the water.  Barn swallows had nested nearby in late spring, but these new birds were bigger, the size of those toy boomerangs that were popular in my childhood.  I thought quite a bit about these living gliders during the next four miles of my sweaty run, as my deepest...

Everybody has heard of Halley's comet and its regular orbit viewable from Earth every seventy-five years or so.  (Young people, you can start looking for it in 2062.)  And many people have memories of the Hale-Bopp comet from when it first showed up in our planetary neighborhood twenty-five years ago.  But the NEOWISE comet?  No one, not a single person, nadie , had ever heard of it until the middle of last March when it was discovered by and named after the space telescope used in its detection.  Comets excite both casual stargazers and seasoned astronomers for a number of reasons.  For one thing, like NEOWISE, they often surprise us, appearing from the farthest reaches of our solar system unpredictably.  Their sneaky first-time visits are difficult to notice since comets are very small bodies, often just a few miles across.  Comprised of mostly ice and dust, they're early leftover remnants from the formation of our sun's orbiting bodies b...

Barbecues, parades and fireworks are the quintessential elements of Fourth of July celebrations across the United States.  Unfortunately COVID-19 put a damper on the festivities in many communities this year, including in Prescott, Arizona, my summer home.  But an especially colorful sign of the holiday was on display: the rufous hummingbird.  I can't be exactly sure when these migratory birds first appeared in Yavapai County, but I do know that there were some reports of their appearances in the Flagstaff area at the end of June.  So I wasn't surprised when I caught my first glimpse of the rufous hummingbird in my tree-filled yard over the holiday weekend.  It was at the nectar feeder outside my living room window where I first saw the mature male.  His attempts at stealing some drinks were rebuffed by a resident male Anna's who had claimed the feeder in the spring shortly after I filled it.  Two years ago a rufous actually won the dogfights that ...

"There's a nesting pair of trogons on South Fork Road, just before you cross the bridge, on the left side of the road.  The trunk of the sycamore tree they chose seems awfully thin, but they're there."  These were the exact details the earnest staff at Cave Creek Ranch, my weekend's lodging, gave me when I set off for the hunt.  I had driven over four hours to Cave Creek Canyon in southeastern Arizona because the area is famous in the summer for its elegant trogons.  In addition, a pair apparently nests in that very specific area - if not that exact tree! - every year.  So why would I have any doubts? Well I might have suspected the advice was too good to be true when, the afternoon before I set off on my quest, another guest at the lodge told me he was unsuccessful in his own search that day.  "Yeah, I spent a lot of time looking, but nothing."  I left early the next morning undaunted nonetheless, visions of this neotropical bird dancing in my head....

I remember each time I've ever seen a coati - or coatimundi - in the wild.  F or close to thirty years i t's been an easy number to recollect: one.  At least that's where the count languished until this past weekend, when my lifetime sightings dramatically increased to three!    This relative of the raccoon is not nearly as common as that masked cousin which ranges over most of North America.  The coati is far-ranging himself, but throughout Latin America; the only areas in the United States where he resides are in Arizona and New Mexico.  He has been spotted as far north as Spur Cross Ranch, north of Phoenix, but the species is more often seen in the southern Arizona sky islands, where Sierra Madre habitat thrives high above surrounding desert environments.   My long-ago first sighting was in Chiricahua National Monument in the far southeastern corner of the Grand Canyon State.  I was camping in the park and was on a shuttle bus that too...