Exciting Bird!

Today John Wilson and I took off at dawn and drove up past 10,000 feet on South Baldy in the Magdalena Range, surveying a rather unlikely habitat for the annual “Backyard” Bird Count. I doubted that we would see much more than ravens and a few boreal forest- type hardy songbirds of the general type …

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Preview and Tease

Reviews on deck of many books– Dan Baum on guns (see Saturday the 16th’s’s WSJ review section), David Quammen on scary viruses; and most fun of all, Katrina van Grouw’s The Unfeathered Bird…

Curmudgeonly Quotes and Related Matters

A :Dave Petzal, Field & Stream’s resident curmudgeon (and the main if not only reason to read that mag any more) was asked why he had such a bad attitude. He responded: “Because I have had the opportunity to observe human beings for seven decades, and if you do it for that long and don’t …

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Dawn at Harbin, 1928

A ragged dawn, yellowish gray, was loping in from Siberia, like a frightened pariah dog, when we finally left the Fantasie. The town recoiled from the lightening streets, huddled miserably in the bitter cold, under a ragged smoke scroll, crouching almost at the top of the lived-in world. A forgotten town, miserable in its licensed …

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Valentine Dogs

From Shiri: Riss and Tavi. And– on a “new” computer, how do I center photos?

Goshawks in Love

Courtesy of Pecular. Happy Valentine’s Day! Here’s a link to a bigger version of the photograph, and here is one to the photographer, photoblogger Juanma Hernandez: Gos photos and more, including the first action scenes I have ever seen of a wryneck…

Ice Age Art

I enjoyed this review in the Financial Times of an exhibit at the British Museum and thought you might, too. I really liked this picture of a 20,000 year-old mamoth ivory carving of a wisent, or European bison (Bison bonasus). As I have mentioned here many times, it’s amazing that the very earliest Paleolithic cave art …

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Eagle study

I am working on a portfolio for review at an upcoming art conference, and selected an eagle study as the theme. Here are a few of those images. (Click on an image to enlarge.) Enjoy!

Got Geese?

We are absolutely overrun with Canada geese this winter. I can’t remember a year since we moved here in 2007 that we’ve had this many. Lately we have been in their flight-path as they spend the day feeding in grain fields and pastures to the east of us and then return to reservoirs and creeks …

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