I came long ago to be suspicious of the encyclopedic impulse, the naive notion that knowledge could be captured and condensed in its entirety in a way that would not reduce its value. Encyclopedias of birds, birding, birdlife, whatever they are called, seem particularly susceptible to superficiality, and browsing most of them gives me what [...]

Darlene and I found the Benson sewage ponds swanless this morning, so headed down to St. David, halfway hoping that the great white vagrant had put down on a field or pond somewhere in between.
It was not to be, but in the town of St. David itself, we ran across a small band of Mountain [...]

It seems strange three days before Christmas to be watching hummingbirds, but that’s how I spent an hour this afternoon. We have three feeders filled right now, and two are firmly in the possession of a male Anna’s Hummingbird and a female Broad-billed Hummingbird. The center feeder, though, appears to belong to everyone and to [...]

As a reward to those readers who have held on through the last few smudgy photos, here’s a nice drake Redhead, one of the half dozen that are lingering close to shore at Kennedy Lake these last few days. You just can’t beat a close-up duck!

A failed twitch for a reported Tundra Swan at Avra Valley turned into a very pleasant couple of hours of birding on a cold, clear afternoon. As usual in the winter, there were several Black and Say’s Phoebes hanging around the ponds, and the “magic cottonwoods” almost always have a Vermilion Flycatcher or two. Today [...]