Mike in the Wild

I soon started calling the white-headed bird visiting my Prescott feeders Uncle Fester.  Like the well-known member of the Addams family, the bird appeared bald, and the black stripes on both sides of its face made the bird's eyes look dark and sunken.  In my years of birdwatching, I had never seen anything like it. After I realized it wasn't an exotic new species, I began to think it was a white-breasted nuthatch with a color variation.  Maybe the bird was missing its head's black patch that sometimes appears like a thin black stripe stretching between its eyes from beak to nape.  Then I thought it might be a red-breasted nuthatch, a bird that only rarely visits my yard.  But I soon recognized the bird as a pygmy nuthatch without its normally gray head feathers.   As I studied the photographs I took, I also discovered it lacked any buff hue in its sides and belly.  Uncle Fester was leucistic, having a genetic condition where an animal has an abse...

I awoke to the sound of breaking glass coming from outside my bedroom window.   Even though it was 12:30 AM, I grabbed a flashlight and headed outside in the direction of the noise, towards my neighbors' house.  I knew they were out of town, and I would have wanted them to similarly keep an eye on my place while I traveled.  When I reached the end of my driveway, I could see a pair of bright eyes across the street reflecting the beam of my flashlight.  On a slope below where my neighbors kept their trash bins, a bear was staring directly at me.  And then it turned, climbed up the slope, and sauntered away down the street.   Just a few weeks later, I would have an entirely different bear story that occurred very much closer -  not a hundred feet away but a mere six feet from my front door.  My summer had begun several weeks earlier with lots of bear sightings in my Prescott neighborhood.  There were stories of a big one that kept get...