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-...

"Stop calling that  bird a robin redbreast, it's a plain, old robin," are words that resonated in my mind when I first started photographing this avian a couple years ago.  The childhood chastisements were from the older neighborhood kids who wanted to show how much they knew.  While bruising my ego a little, they didn't dampen my interest in this very common and easily identifiable bird in my suburban New Jersey neighborhood.   Many years later and many miles away, and much to my surprise, I also see the bird in my Phoenix neighborhood.  I've always associated the robin with green lawns, pulling earth worms from the muddy ground of just watered grasses.  It turns out that the irrigated landscape of the desert southwest is an ideal hunting ground for this insect loving avian.  It also turns out that this "robin redbreast" isn't just a plain old robin, it's an American robin.   A real robin is actually the European robin, not living ...