Even professional birders need to slip away once in a while, so Alison and I headed to Sedona for a couple of days, where we enjoyed the scenery and (what else?) birded! Just as on our last visit, we found birding Oak Creek Canyon a mixture of delight and frustration: frustration at the traffic and […]

Madera Canyon and Patagonia Lake
Spent the day birding with Mitchell; Mitchell’s company is always enjoyable, whatever the birds, and getting together with him always reminds me of how wonderfully small the birding world is: his uncle, Sol, was a genial fixture of my mornings in Princeton’s Institute Woods back in the 80s.
We set out to […]

A couple of days afield with old friends from New Jersey, Marcia and Charles. It was all fun, but as usual this time of year, some of the best birding was down the Santa Cruz Valley between Tucson and Arizona City. The raptor show was unparalleled, with multiple Merlins, Prairie Falcons, and—my favorite—Ferruginous Hawks. We […]

Doug wrote a great article in my Birding magazine department, “Sources,” a little while ago; I’d really enjoyed working with him, and was delighted when I found out that he and his fiancée, Elizabeth, would be in Tucson. So we met up and headed out to the sewage beds; our morning together confirmed everything our […]