Mike in the Wild

  Some of my earliest memories of growing up in suburban New Jersey involve feeding the birds.  My mother would regularly send my sister, brother, or me out into the backyard to spread stale slices of bread with the specific instructions to tear or crumble them into small pieces first.  I can mostly remember doing this in the winter, when food wasn't as readily available for the birds that didn't migrate to warmer climates.   I recall one bird in particular, the chickadee, above all others.  Maybe it was its comical name or perhaps its abundant population or even its ability to survive brutal winters despite its diminutive size that preserves the little bird in my mind after a half century.   That ancient memory might help explain the warm nostalgia I feel when the chickadee is one of the first birds I see when I visit my little mountain retreat in the woods outside Prescott.   It's consistently one of the fastest to rediscover my newly-...

One month into the fall season and it finally feels like autumn in Arizona.  Aspen trees in the mountains and cottonwoods in the river valleys all glow yellow against a backdrop of blue skies.  Meanwhile temperatures have dipped below freezing in many areas and desert homes have switched off their air conditioners and turned on their electric heat pumps.  And one more sign that it's almost winter - dark-eyed juncos are making a showy appearance. The red-backed member of this sparrow family is quite common in the pine forests of Arizona.  This form is one of several sub-species, or races, of the dark-eyed junco, a bird that ranges over most of Canada and the United States.  The juncos' separate breeding grounds in different corners of the continent seem to maintain the races' identifying traits, which are mostly found in coloring.   I've come to associate the red-backed sub-species with my leisurely visits to Prescott.  P redominately steel-gra...