Mike in the Wild

When I came face to face with my first moray almost thirty years ago in Honolua Bay on Maui, I was terrified.  I was snorkeling in shallow water close to the rocky shore when the animal appeared to lunge at me.  Of course it didn't.  Instead, it was most likely nestled in a rocky crevice with mouth agape as it breathed in water and waited for small fish prey.  I was new to snorkeling, meeting the vast underwater world for the first time, and just the word moray eel was menacing to me.   Today I'm much more comfortable around these members of the eel family.   Hawaii is home to almost forty species of morays, the whitemouth being the most common.  In fact on my recent trip to Maui, I saw at least five different specimens of the whitemouth moray at five different sites.  An especially fat individual was even one of the last fishes I observed off Napili Beach on the last snorkeling foray of my vacation.   Over the course of the we...

As if I needed another Siren's call to lure me back to Maui, I discovered a spotted eagle ray off of Maluaka Beach.  I had never seen one on any of my frequent trips to the island where, until my late morning stop at Maluaka the day before flying home to Phoenix, I always considered turtles, moray eels, and the occasional barracuda as my most thrilling finds.  My brother-in-law was visiting Maui at the same time and had just told me about the time he and my sister-in-law had swam with several a few hundred feet off of their time-share's beach in Kaanapali.  It had been a one-time encounter in the more than twenty years that the couple have been regular visitors to the island. Just before my own encounter, I had snorkeled for the second time in two days at Ahihi-Kinau Natural Area Reserve in South Maui.   The 807 acres of protected ocean off shore from a stark volcanic landscape is closed to motorized boating and to fishing because, as the signs say, "Wildlife Co...

As the one year anniversary approached since I discovered a bat cave in my Phoenix neighborhood, I was keen to visit the site again.   Early June was uncharacteristically pleasant, barely reaching the one hundred degree mark during the day.  So it wasn't a difficult decision to head to the site, near 40th Street along the Arizona Canal, to watch Mexican free-tailed bats swarm out at sunset.   Last year, the summer migrants departed their daytime roost in the thousands, in an endless undulating cloud that lasted close to an hour.  It was late June, and the numbers could have included some new fledglings from nests hidden in the long floodwater tunnel.  That's at least one possible reason why the bats departing the cave were only a trickle, maybe not even in the hundreds on the early June evening I recently visited the site.   There weren't enough bats or sunlight to catch any pictures of the creatures except for one of a lone individual that p...

As I feared, the warbler trail has finally gone cold.  With no new species to report it might be time to focus on the cardinals which have begun appearing in Arizona.  Over the weekend I saw at least five black-headed grosbeaks, both male and female, along with one male western tanager: each the first since last summer.   I actually hit the warbler trail again yesterday at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and did encounter two males: a Wilson's and a Townsend's.  But I've already seen these species since the beginning of spring, so I was a little disappointed they weren't specimens like the red-faced or hermit which have so far eluded me.   The members of the cardinal family were on my property in Prescott where the grosbeaks were quick to discover the suet and seeds I placed in feeders.  The tanager is a much less common visitor to my neighborhood and seems to eschew any of my handouts.  I wasn't surprised he was a fleeting presence, p...

Last week I finally reached ten warblers for the year.  Eight of the species were sighted in the Phoenix area over the last month.  Two of them were while on a winter cruise stopping in Cozumel.  And then this past weekend, while on another much closer trip, I achieved number eleven with a yellow warbler encounter. I was in Prescott, almost a hundred miles away, for the first time since last September.  Near my cabin is a community that maintains a couple of ponds alongside Willow Creek.  The stream was still flowing steady with runoff from our wet winter.  The immediate landscape is dense with deciduous trees, including towering cottonwoods.  Many were budding, starting to show off their seasonal bursts of foliage.   Loud calls rang from the treetops.  In fact, the repetitive tunes were familiar ones that I recognized as those of a yellow warbler's.  Their strength is quite out of proportion with their source's diminutive size....

For the last month, I've been on a hunt for warblers.  The small songbirds have been migrating through the Phoenix area, some arriving for a summer breeding season in the Arizona desert, others on their way to sites further north.  I've also noticed several orioles, especially the hooded, arriving in the area.  And on Monday I was thrilled to encounter another migrant, a yellow-breasted chat, for the first time ever. Warblers are in a large family, one comprising 117 species, almost half of which range into the United States.  Orioles are a much less plentiful species with only nine types breeding here.  As for chats, the number is one.  In fact, there's only one chat species at all, the yellow-breasted.   And until not very long ago, experts actually considered it to be a member of the warbler family.   Needless to say, the chat wasn't on my radar as I hit the warbler trail over the weekend.  I came up with nothing in my neighborho...

My fascination with this year's spring warbler migration is turning into a contest: just how many species can I spot?  The number reached five this past weekend after I encountered a Wilson's and a black-throated gray, both in Phoenix.  They added to the painted redstart, Lucy's warbler, and common yellowthroat I had identified over the two previous weeks.   Of course factoring in the warblers that spend the winter in the Phoenix area, like the yellow-rumped and the orange-crowned, the number is even higher.  As a result, the local number of the small, colorful songbirds rises to seven.  My preoccupation with the warblers really started in February, on Cozumel in Mexico, where I spotted two visiting species, the American redstart and the pine warbler.  Unfortunately these birds mostly don't migrate to the far western United States, preferring the east for their summer breeding seasons.  Nonetheless, adding them, this year's warbler-spotting number...