Mike in the Wild

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...

North Americans love their birds, and two of the most popular might be the northern cardinal and the blue jay.  While Arizonans enjoying seeing the cardinal on occasional visits to their backyard feeders, it's not nearly as common here as it is east of the Mississippi.  However, we never see the noisy but colorful blue jay that populates only central and eastern regions of the continent.   Or don't we? It turns out we've got several blue-colored jay species that call the state home, but none of them are the generically named blue jay from the east.   Our Steller's jay is similarly shaped as the blue jay, also with a long crest and some striped wings and tail feathers.  But it's colored in shades of blue, black and gray, with almost no white.  Nevertheless it's a close cousin, in the same genus cyanocitta .  Other blue-colored jays in the state include the Woodhouse's scrub jay, the pinyon jay and the Mexican jay, all similarly shaped, without c...

A four and a half mile hike from the Desert Vista Trailhead provided some authentic Sonoran Desert excitement.  The Phoenix Sonoran Preserve is on the far north side of the city, close to twenty miles from downtown.  The park protects some pristine desert from the urban sprawl that's already encroaching Wildflower season having peaked, I was expecting to photograph mostly cactus blooms, desert birds and new vistas.  However when I arrived shortly after sunrise, I was surprised to see a number of hot air balloons floating above the park.  For almost an hour they appeared in various locations to the north and west of my route.  But even more exciting for me was finding a massive great-horned owl's nest in a saguaro cactus just some minutes into the excursion.  Perched inside was the mother with up to three nestlings.  While the light wasn't quite perfect when I spotted the birds, it was ideal a couple hours later when I returned to my car via the same...