Mike in the Wild

We've all heard of the Easter Bunny, the human-sized hare that brings children chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, and egg-shaped confections in colorful baskets on Easter morning.  However it was an entirely different animal, a wood duck, that was on my mind this Easter Sunday. My runs and walks through my Phoenix neighborhood mostly follow the Arizona Canal and pass through several adjacent parks with large ponds.  As a result, I enjoy birdwatching while getting exercise, spying the egrets and kingfishers that call the waterways home at least part of the year.   Among several uniquely winter visitors are wood ducks that usually make their appearances as lone individuals, first arriving in December.  I'll spot one and observe him for a week, sometimes two, before he disappears, hopefully moving on to another habitat.  More than a week ago, I saw a male, or drake, in the company of a pair of mallards at Granada Park.  Shortly after, I spotted them again, n...

I've been a fan of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum since I first moved to Arizona way back in 1988.  The destination is still a lot of things: a zoo, a botanical garden, an art gallery, and a nature preserve, conveniently collected in a breathtaking corner of Tucson parkland.  In these multiple ways, the park teaches the visitor about the natural history of the Sonoran Desert.   The ecosystem spans much of the southern half of the Grand Canyon State, a big part of Mexico's state of Sonora, southeastern California, and most of Baja California.  In fact the desert even surrounds most of the Sea of Cortez. On a recent visit, several first-time encounters reminded me how every visit to the ASDM - as the museum is known - expands my knowledge of the region in surprising ways.  I hadn't been through the entrance gate for thirty seconds when I stumbled upon an iguana near the footpath.  At first I thought the lizard was a chuckwalla, a common reptile in the ...

After six months away from Prescott, I was eager to return to my little retreat in the pines.  While longer days and milder temperatures finally welcomed me back to the mountains, it was the birds that regularly visit my deck's feeders that were really beckoning.  Of course, after a long spell of empty coffers, the birds were wisely seeking native sustenance in the trees and bushes in the surrounding landscape.   Acorn woodpeckers were the first imbibers of the suet I hung out, while squirrels unfortunately were the first to find the seeds.  Once I frightened off the four-legged interlopers, mountain chickadees, pine siskins, and white-breasted nuthatches had the pick of their favorite kernels.  I was relieved that some of my favorite forest creatures had successfully weathered another winter in the mountains. The junipers in my neighborhood were resplendent in blooms, something I don't recall in such abundance before.  Massive clusters of tiny golden ...