Coyote Crossing

Cats and windmills

Image by Carl Buell.

The next person I see arguing that we shouldn’t worry about giant windmills because domestic cats kill far more birds, I’m going to take out to the middle of the Mojave so I can run them over with my Jeep.

This will be a

Violet-green swallows

Of all the side-blotched lizards I saw on my Sunday hike – and there were hundreds – this was the only fellow that didn’t run out of camera range. He flinched, as they all do, and he did the usual sets of pushups, but then for some reason he

The birds and the bees

I was in Fern Canyon this afternoon, a short stretch of Wentworth Canyon that’s moist enough along one part of the south wall to support a few feet of Adiantum fern. The story is that the place was wetter once and the ferns covered the canyon

Carduelis psaltria

Our apartment here is one of six, in an L-shaped building the inside corner of which is filled with a little walled courtyard. Most of the courtyard is in pavers, but there’s a little square garden section with a mature palm and an eight-foot … (continues)

Amphispiza bilineata

Because I shoot video with my iPhone, which has limited resolution and no creditable zoom, I suggest you hit “play” on this video and look at this photo at Wikipedia, which was taken not far away.

If you’re stubborn and want to find the bird in

Lost and Ancient Archives

In May 2008, as long-time readers of this blog know, I left the San Francisco Bay Area where I had lived for a quarter century and moved to the Mojave Desert.  I remember the next month through a bit of a veil. There was a lot of work hauling

Avian mortality at a desert concentrating solar facility

This study, done at the Daggett Solar One plant in the Mojave in the early 1980s, concludes that while local bird populations may not have been critically endangered by Solar One, larger concentrating solar plants could potentially imperil more

Snippet from an email a couple years old

“On my way in to UCSF today: two starlings mobbed a crow mercilessly, harassing her into annoyed, almost panicked flight across the road in front of me, and on the far side of the road the ruckus startled a red-tail, which took off out of his perch

Apotheosis

[Written in January 2008 for a literary website, devoted to self-portrait and writing, that would seem to have gone offline. Putting it here.]

Nine flights of stairs through the parking garage and out into wind-swept streets. Two thirds of a mile

Mono Basin Sage Grouse Is Endangered, But Protection Once Again Delayed

From the Center for Biological Diversity:

LAS VEGAS— In response to a petition and lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental and faith-based groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that a

Oops!

It’s embarrassing, but I misidentified the tracks in this photo. The solution has been corrected.

This intellectual integrity stuff is hard … (continues)