Mike in the Wild

The tragic headlines recounting a local person's death by bear attack did not deter me from heading up the Dandrea Trail to where, five years ago, I had seen my one and only wild bear in Arizona.  What did prevent me from returning to that contact spot was damage from last year's Crook's Fire which closed the trail up near the peaks, the highest in the Bradshaw Mountains.  Lucky for me on this past Monday I discovered I didn't need to venture very far and high into Prescott's forests to see my second bear; I only had to wander the trails that lead from my own neighborhood.   For a week in June, the news reports in Prescott were filled with the story of a Groom Creek resident tragically mauled to death by a black bear, apparently without any provocation.  The victim's neighbor shot the bear dead while it was consuming the dead man.  Fortunately my own encounter on the Dandrea Trail so long ago was a much less harrowing encounter.   In fact it was o...

By this point in July, I thought I'd be sitting under the wide eaves over my deck in Prescott enjoying the afternoon rainstorms that accompany the summer monsoon.  But so far the weather is unusually hot and dry, more June than July-like.  In fact with heavy showers in May, that month was more winter-like.  However, the arrival of rufous hummingbirds at my feeders on July 1st reminded me that some things in nature might still remain predictable. Rufous hummingbirds migrate north from Mexico in the spring, following a mostly coastal route to the Pacific Northwest.  Some birds even travel as far as southeast Alaska to mate and nest.  His work accomplished, the male of the species starts his migration home through the Rocky Mountain states, leaving the female to rear the young on her own.  It's these absentee fathers I've started seeing in Prescott.  Later in the summer and after the males have left, the females and juveniles begin their own migrations....

Warblers were still on my mind as I started my early July hike up the Dandrea Trail in the Bradshaw Mountains south of Prescott.  After all, they were already an obsession when I starting counting all the possible species I could see in Arizona as the colorful family of songbirds migrated into the state this past spring.    After spotting at least one yellow warbler in Prescott in April, my number of individual species encounters was up to nine for the season.  I reckoned I might achieve as many as thirteen as I wandered the trails around Prescott over the summer, especially at the higher elevations where the Dandrea leads.  Through dense pine forests, the rocky trail connects to the region's highest peaks, Mount Union and Mount Davis, both close to eight thousand feet in elevation. I've spotted red-faced warblers and painted redstarts along the trail before, the former being the one I was most looking forward to because I'd not seen one yet in 2023.  Howev...

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...