Mike in the Wild

Almost four years to the exact date I lasted visited the gardens, I returned to Boyce Thompson Arboretum near Superior.  Pulling into the parking lot, I was immediately surprised by one big change: the name.  And later in the morning, I'd be even more surprised by several new bird discoveries.   The property is no longer a state park, having recently separated from a tripartite agreement with Arizona State Parks and the University of Arizona.  In addition, the garden has significantly expanded after absorbing the Wallace Desert Garden's entire collection of plants and trees.   In a Herculean effort spanning six years, thousands of specimens were successfully relocated from their North Scottsdale home to thirteen presumably undeveloped acres at the southern end of Boyce Thompson.  In addition, one-and-a-half miles of trails were added to the park's already extensive network of paths.  As a result there is an endless list of reasons a...

My first encounter with a roadrunner in the wild was through a second floor office window on Bell Road in Phoenix.  It was over thirty years ago that the bird seemed to be proffering to its own reflection in the glass a dead lizard that was hanging from its beak .  I've since seen plenty of other roadrunners in Arizona.  Often they continued to carry prey, like the individual at the Desert Botanical Garden that held the corpse of a round-tailed ground squirrel.  Not far from it, near the park's outside café, another roadrunner amused diners as it begged for popcorn and then flicked the puffy kernels in the air in order to gulp them down. It was on the same grounds where I encountered my first roadrunner nest.  High in a tree's dense canopy, the cluster of sticks hid a single immature bird that I watched mature over several weeks.   My sightings in my back yard are probably much less frequent because a high wall surrounds it.  Roadrunners do indeed...

It's not every weekend I look up into a back yard tree and find a new bird.  After four or five years of avid birdwatching, there are fewer and fewer surprises in my Phoenix neighborhood.  Nonetheless on Saturday I spotted my very first phainopepla in the area, and it was in my yard's lysolomo tree. Over the last couple of weeks, I've actually been paying a lot of attention to what birds are not in my yard.  Winter visitors like a lone Lincoln's sparrow and several white-crowned sparrows have probably already begun their migrations north.  Meanwhile a pair of northern cardinals have stopped indulging in my sunflower seeds.  However a  male does occasionally whistle a mating song from a couple of houses away, apparently in vain as there never seems to be a female in the vicinity.   On my trips out of the city into the undeveloped desert, phainopeplas are frequently some of the first birds I see atop the palo verdes along the road.  They ...

Thar she blows : words I borrowed quite a few times on my February trip to the Big Island of Hawaii.  I was completely blown away - pun intended - by the number of whales I spotted in the ocean from the Kohala Coast during my stay.  The sightings started on my very first afternoon on the island, only an hour after my plane's touchdown, while I prepared to watch sunset on the beach at the Lava Lava Beach Club. I shouldn't have been surprised because mid-winter is the peak time to see humpback whales in Hawaii.  While on a snorkeling excursion out of Keauhou Bay on the Kona Coast, my charter boat encountered several of the cetaceans only minutes into the trip.  It was only the second day of my vacation, so I was amazed to spend twenty minutes in the company of these behemoths so soon.  And I'd soon find out that where I was staying for six of my eight nights on the island, forty miles north on the Kohala Coast, there was a much higher density of the whales.  ...

The first thing travelers notice after landing at the airport in Kona on the Big Island is probably the endless expanse of hardened lava.  They might next ponder its source, the massive volcanoes rising to the east.  Outside the terminal, waiting for their rental car shuttle, they will certainly also be struck by the squawking cacophony of myna birds.    Common mynas were introduced to the Hawaiian Islands from India in the nineteenth century.  Almost two hundred years later they are more numerous than any other avian species in the Aloha State, occupying diverse habitats along the coast.  Rapidly changed with the arrival of the first humans, these areas are no longer hospitable to endemic bird species that evolved over millennia and, in many cases, became extinct.   As a result, the seaside resorts where visitors stay are mostly inhabited by non-native species, like the myna, that thrive far from their original habitats.  Nonetheless at wate...