Mike in the Wild

Durango has always been one of my favorite ski towns. Purgatory ski resort is thirty minutes away, and Wolf Creek with its abundance of powder is just an hour and a half drive.  During my frequent winter visits, I have mostly ignored the Animas River that flowed through town.  In the cold weather, the waterway was gray and icy, its riverbanks lined with snow and leafless trees.  However in early June, as I recently discovered, the river was flowing heavy with snowmelt, and its lush banks teamed with birds.  With sunrise temperatures in the low fifties, the Animas was actually inviting me for a morning run.  And as always on any trail, I was hopeful I'd encounter a variety of birds.  Even in my hotel's parking lot, I spied a magpie, apparently curious about the extensive collection of trucks.  While I followed Bennett Street to reach the river, a pair of deer munched on a home's front-yard shrubs.  When I arrived close to the riverfront at 32nd Str...

Recent winter snowstorms brought a couple of feet of powder snow to southwestern Colorado's ski resorts, prompting me to make a last minute weekend trip to the area for two days of skiing.  I never considered bringing my heavy DSLR and telephoto lens on the slopes, but I nonetheless paid close attention to birds that shared the forested and snowy mountains with us skiers. For the most part,  two types of birds - both corvids: ravens and gray jays - appeared near the ski trails.  It's possible that some of what I thought were ravens, were in fact crows.  I make this speculation because some of these black birds were smaller than the turkey-size ravens I see in Arizona, and many were in large flocks. Along the roads between the Wolf Creek and Purgatory Resorts, I saw a few other birds, including yet another corvid, the magpie.  Numerous birds-of-prey, including red-tailed hawks, perched from power poles and tree branches besides the highways.  I also noti...