Mike in the Wild

One of the many joys of summer in central Arizona is warm weather that makes for comfortable night time stargazing.  It's also a time of year when the Milky Way rotates across the celestial sphere in the early evening hours, making for an especially convenient time to see the cloudy effect that our solar system's nearest stellar neighbors paints across the sky. As always the constellations of Sagittarius and Scorpio straddle the galaxy in Earth's Northern Hemisphere.  And for at least part of this July, our sun's two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, joined that same area of the sky shortly after sunset.  In addition, the end of the month brought a new moon, keeping Earth's natural satellite from adding a source of distracting light.  The combination of bodies and timing created a tantalizing composition to photograph under most circumstances; if you're able to add a terrestrial landmark like Prescott's iconic Thumb Butte Mountain, it was an irresistibl...

It's easy to anthropomorphize animals, assigning human qualities and traits to them.  We often call our dogs sad when they're scolded or our cats happy when they run toward an open can of tuna fish.   But their reactions and motivations are based on their own unique and usually more limited animal emotions.  However when I observed a pair of summer tanagers in my Prescott yard this past weekend, it was hard not to think in terms of a caring human story. This is the first summer I've notice these migratory birds from Mexico in my neighborhood.  Since June I've seen them high in the ponderosa pine trees, the male flashing his bright scarlet suit and the female sporting a drab yellow coat of feathers.  But their appearances, as showy as they were, were brief until this past weekend. One morning I saw a burst of bright red against the dull green of my front yard's alligator juniper tree.  It was the male summer tanager, hopping from branch to branch ...

Living out a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" is not how I imagined a day on the Verde Valley wine trail: one moment sipping chardonnay, the next ducking for cover as a raptor buzzed me with extended talons.  The verdant riparian area that borders Oak Creek as it meanders from Sedona to the Verde River channels water through sunny slopes that are the home of several central Arizona vineyards.  But it is also an ideal habitat for wildlife, including migratory birds like the common black hawk that attacked me. A visit to a winery, then lunch with a river view and one more winery tour are not bad ways to spend a warm Friday after the Fourth of July.  The last stop, DA Ranch in Page Springs, sprawls along a scenic estate populated with towering cottonwoods and several weeping willow trees.  Its spacious wrap-around porches offer relaxing views of grapevines and mountains.  And this birder was especially interested in an animated female vermilion flycatche...

Most of my ideas for posts and stories materialize quickly: I take first-time shots of an owl or I cross paths with a bear in the woods.  Other times they take a year or two as I build up a library of photos and encounters with various members of a bird family until I think the collection is informative; I still haven't completed a post on doves in the Arizona wild.  And once in a while the story percolates in single brush strokes of unique events until the picture suddenly sharpens and comes into focus.  The finishing touch this past weekend on one such tome was a brief and sonorous encounter with a single hummingbird. Hummingbirds are always a fascinating bird to observe, photograph and write about.  I've seen many of the more than a dozen species that call Arizona at least a part-time home or that just pass through on their migrations.   Outside of the very southeastern corner of the state, the variety of visitors or residents is maybe only in the sing...

The metronome of chirping crickets are a close second to an owl's hoots as the most calming notes in an Arizona night's soundscape.  But every once in a while, this dreamy peace is broken by the din of coyotes in a seemingly frantic pursuit of prey.   This noise is not the long and mournful howl we associate with wolves and westerns, but a cacophony of yips and yowls that make you think a pack of ten canines are terrifying their unlucky prey.  But experts say this vocalization is often just one or two coyotes fooling their victim into thinking he's greatly outnumbered. So it's not surprising that in the folktales of some Native Americans, especially in the southwestern United States, the coyote often portrays a trickster or some other kind of deceiver.   In the canine's historic range of what is now mainly Mexico and the deserts and plains of the United States and Canada, he is the most common predator for herds of cattle and other livestock.  The ...

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...

All went very well with my Jake tour of duty - he was his normal affectionate, playful, hungry, pooping, peeing jock-like self every time I checked in.   My visits to my vacationing friends' three-year old indoor cat, Jake, were by 9 am every morning, so I had to fill their backyard stray's food and water early.  Apparently this outside cat comes around dinnertime, so I never saw Bella, as she's been named. Yesterday, I noticed as I was checking all the door locks just before leaving, that something had gotten into Bella's food bowl in the twenty minutes since I'd filled the empty container.  It appeared as if a visitor had made a running leap into the table-top bowl as there was an impact crater-like depression and scattered bits of kibble about.  Who did this?   Another cat, a roof rat, a bird?  I needed to find out, but as I was running late for that day's other appointments, it would have to wait until tomorrow.  But my bet was on the st...