Mike in the Wild

Predictability is one of the many pleasures in birding because it's so often a rarity.  After all, birds are wild creatures, navigating a barrage of nature's variables like seasons, weather, long-distance migrations, and the selfish, competing interests of so many other creatures, including man.  As a result sometimes merely catching a glimpse of a tanager high in a tree for only a brief moment can thrill the most jaded birder. Of course filled feeders in our yards do consistently attract many birds, which we can watch from sunrise to sunset as they peck at and gulp down our handouts.  As a result I've learned some of the animals' behaviors, like that acorn woodpeckers in Prescott eschew most seeds, and instead voraciously attack the peanut butter suet.  Meanwhile, lesser goldfinches avoid the suet altogether and instead imbibe in one or more of the five seeds in Jay's Premium Blend Birdseed. One Prescott bird that doesn't appear able to straddle the suet contai...

Bird-watching presents challenges even from the comfort of our porch chairs and backyards.  While feeders and native landscaping attract a wide range of avian visitors, our successful efforts can sometimes lead to a bit of confusion.  That is, many of these birds will also breed in your neighborhood with their offspring paying visits as soon as they're out of their nests.  But will you recognize these fledglings and juveniles as the same species who munch on your seeds and peck at your suet most of the year? It took studying a couple of photographs to identify a junior spotted towhee in my Prescott yard this past summer.  No beady red eyes, no jet-black head, no cinnamon torso: he was just a plain, dark bird.  It was likewise with another common sparrow in Arizona's pine forests, the dark-eyed junco.  He scratched at the dirt and pebbles below my deck just like you'd expect of a junco but his streaked and mottled brown feathers made him look more like a h...

I wanted to write an elegy, a serious reflection on watching a black-headed grosbeak die on my porch.  There was the thud, and the plop, and the ruffles, not to mention the tiny yellow feathers, when the bird hit the window.  There were my exclamations and futile attempts to call a bird rescue center, if one even existed in my mountain town.  But mostly there were the painful seconds and minutes that slowly ticked as the grosbeak stopped its desperate attempts to fly and succumbed to whatever serious internal injuries it suffered when it thought the bright reflection of my forested front yard was a safe space to fly and feed and live out this part of its summer. As I grasped for an appropriate funeral and as if on queue, the Laurel and Hardy of my yard, an acorn woodpecker and a Woodhouse's scrub jay, appeared on the scene to distract me.  The clownish woodpecker squawked because it wanted to feed on suet, the smart aleck jay squawked because it wanted one more pean...

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...