Mike in the Wild

You'd think that joining a whale-watching tour with the specific objective of spotting a blue whale would be a slam dunk success.  After all, the blue whale is not just any whale: it's the largest animal that has ever existed in the history of Earth.  That's right, it's larger than the brontosaurus and the tyrannosaurus rex and every other dinosaur that ever roamed on land or swam in the sea.  So how could you possibly miss one? Unfortunately all whale species faced the same fate of near extinction due to rampant hunting that lasted well into the first half of the twentieth century.  As a result of a global effort to stop the slaughter, many populations have rebounded; today there may be over ten thousand blue whales navigating throughout our planet's oceans.  In the eastern Pacific there are over a thousand, at least one of which was my target off the coast of San Diego. Like many whales, blue whales migrate great distances from feeding grounds in cold...

I see lots of what I call water birds in Arizona.  Also called waterfowl, these creatures spend most of their lives on or near bodies of water, where they depend on a lake or river for their primary habitat.  But there are many other general names for the ever-present mallards and the winter-visiting ring-necked ducks, to name just a couple of the species that are easy to spot in Phoenix. Ducks are frequently described as either dabbling or diving, with the fowl in the first category (e.g. mallards) feeding closer to the water's surface and the second (e.g. ring-necked ducks) hunting deeper below.  And depending on your source of information, dabbling ducks are very often referred to as marsh ducks, and divers as bay ducks.  Now you may be starting to understand why I just call them all water birds. But I became even more enlightened when on a recent trip to San Diego I discovered yet another group of these birds: sea ducks.  These animals are indeed duc...