Mike in the Wild

I write a lot about the sounds I hear in the wild: the hoot of an owl, the melody of a mockingbird and the squawk of a woodpecker, to name just a few.  But the song of a canyon wren might be one of the most beautiful in the bird world as it beckons the hiker and birdwatcher like a Siren calling Odysseus.  And there's a double reward because spotting this tiny bird is also a singular visual delight, well worth the effort and patience it might take. Fitting for such a special bird, each memory of my three life-time encounters with the canyon wren is indelibly etched in my brain.  The first time I saw one was at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Arizona's oldest and largest botanical garden, located an hour east of Phoenix in Tonto National Forest.   The individual of this wide-ranging bird species was perched on a boulder in the Sonoran Desert Exhibit and initially seemed more curious about me than I was of him; I was new to birding and didn't quite know the differenc...

I had just finished lamenting   in my last post   over the dearth of "wow" moments in this year's bird sightings when I drove into just such an event three houses up the street from my home.  In fact I actually drove under an entire flock of them. I've seen cedar waxwings only once before, near my sister-in-law's home in Ventura County near Los Angeles.  There might have been two dozen of them gathered high in some trees in that tightly manicured neighborhood.  Even when I was more than twenty feet below them, my camouflaged presence so close to their perch's leafy canopy scared them away.  Nevertheless they kept returning to the same couple of trees which allowed me to get a few photographs over the course of a weekend. I wasn't quite that lucky with last week's sighting though.  As I drove along my street, I noticed the group of birds in a palo verde tree.  Since the tree hadn't burst into its spring blooms yet, the eight or nine individual ...

By this time every year I've usually written a couple of stories about the waterfowl visiting local waterways.  Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals carrying fresh water from reservoirs up the Salt River and by parks landscaped with lakes.  These bodies of water create habitat for lots of waterfowl, especially seasonal migrants from northern climates. Last winter for the first time in the neighborhood, I discovered mergansers - both the hooded and common varieties - and canvasbacks spending some time on these local waterways.  They joined my list of local first time sightings, a collection that includes wood ducks, northern pintails, goldeneyes and northern shovelers, to name a few. But this year is different.  My stops at nearby Granada Park allow me to see a multitude of visitors like ring-necked ducks and American wigeons: they're there every winter.  And I spot plenty of mallards dabbling in the Arizona Canal and American coots paddling on my neighborhood's...

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...

A day at sea is an ideal way to observe the wide variety of wildlife that lives much of its life at the ocean's surface, where salt water meets air.  Of course only a small percentage of fish species regularly breaks through this barrier: the flying fish is one.  Meanwhile hundreds of varieties of birds know how to dive underwater hunting for food.  And many mammals like whales and seals thrive in this zone, as they spend all or significant periods of their lives swimming through the seas. So whether your interest is in birding or whale watching, a plethora of tour companies offer an itinerary that will satisfy your curiosity about these surface-visiting animals.  Hornblower Cruises, for one, offers a three-and-a-half hour winter trip twice a day out of San Diego for sightings of gray whales as they migrate between Alaska and Baja.  I wasn't disappointed on my sunny, mid-January trip when the staff pointed out eight individual southbound gray whales, incl...

It is well known that many whales migrate great distances from feeding grounds in cold waters closer to the poles to breeding grounds in the warmer waters of the tropics.  Some species like the humpback whale range throughout all the oceans and seas of the world while others like the gray whale have a much smaller range.   But all these species have the same story of near extinction due to over-hunting and then, more recently, some recovery thanks to a global effort to stop the slaughter. However the Atlantic populations of the gray whale were indeed hunted to extinction over two hundred years ago when mankind coveted its blubber for lamp oil and its baleen for corsets.  But the species survived in the Pacific with a small group hanging on near Russia, and a much larger one, with over twenty thousand individuals today, persevering on North America's western coast.  It was several individuals in this latter population that I recently had a chance to see on...

It's the sqawks that get my attention in Phoenix.  And the peeps in Prescott.  Every so often it's the rattle or drumming in both places.  But once in a while I hear the long laugh of a bird from high in a tree.  They're all the calls of woodpeckers, but it's only the ladder-backed woodpecker that sounds like he's in this fit of laughter. While it's the acorn and hairy woodpeckers I see in Prescott, it's the Gila woodpecker and gilded flickers that I usually see in and around Phoenix.  But the ladder-backed appears in both locations:  cool mountain forests in the summer and mild deserts in the winter.  But the species is not migratory like me; instead it's much more tolerant of extremes in climate and will put up with both snow and blistering heat. It was on a chilly desert morning last weekend when I heard the distinctive cackle of the ladder-backed woodpecker in my Phoenix neighborhood.  I quickly identified two males high in a pine tree, wh...