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March 29, 2024

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No Time for Tuckerman -

Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Quitter Returns! -

Monday, March 21, 2022

Putting the goober in gubernatorial -

Friday, January 28, 2022

Return of Bird of the Week: Common Potoo

Common Potoo, Pantanal, Brazil

We’re headed to Brazil for this week’s bird, to the Pantanal, the immense swamp in southern Brazil. And the bird is the Common Potoo, a master of camouflage. You have to look closely to see the bird. Potoos are nocturnal insectivores, and during the daytime hold these vertical poses, perched motionless on the branches their coloration so strongly resembles. WC was guided to this bird by local tribe people. WC would have walked by it a dozen times without seeing it. Here’s another view. This view gives you an idea of the size of the bird’s mouth. Like their cousins,…

Return of Bird of the Week: Kelp Gull

Kelp Gull, Ushaia, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina

WC doesn’t intend to neglect the Southern Hemisphere’s birds. Here is one of the most widely distributed birds of the bottom half of the planet, the Kelp Gull. It’s found throughout the Southern Ocean, from Australia to South America to Africa, and from coastal Antarctica to Ecuador. It’s probably the most widely distributed gull on the planet. An omnivore, tolerant of mankind’s activities and highly adaptable, you have to admire it even if you don’t like it dining menu, which includes penguin chicks and carrion. Kelp Gulls are three year gulls; that is, they take three years to reach maturity….

Return of Bird of the Week: Western Meadowlark

Western Meadowlark, Farm to Market Road, McCall, Idaho

There are compensations for leaving Alaska. Surely one of them is the Western Meadowlark. It’s one of our most abundant and widely distributed grassland birds, found in open country from natural and planted grasslands of the Northern Great Plains to the Sagebrush Sea of the Intermountain West to the tidal flats along the Pacific Ocean. Its common occurrence, colorful plumage, and superb song make it one of North America’s most popular birds. Six states have named it their state bird. Despite the name and beautiful song, it’s not a lark. It’s an Icterid, a cousin to the Red-winged and Rusty…

Return of Bird of the Week: Rufous-winged Sparrow

Rufous-winged Sparrow, SE Arizona

The Rufous-winged Sparrow is just barely a North American bird, if you are a birder who keeps lists. This sparrow just barely occurs in southern Arizona; most of its range is in Medico which, for North American birders, isn’t part of North America. Geography doesn’t enter into it. The Rufous-winged has the distinction of being one of the last bird species in the United States to be discovered and described. It’s an uncommon resident of local distribution in the Sonoran Desert region from south-central Arizona to northern Sinaloa, Mexico. The species prefers the scrub and grasses along washes and streams….

Return of Bird of the Week: Great Blue Heron

More than any other North American bird species, the Great Blue Heron reminds you that birds evolved from dinosaurs. If anything brings the images of a flying dinosaur to mind, it is a Great Blue Heron slowly lumbering across the sky. WC is used to seeing these big herons doing strange things, but last weekend they showed him something new. A dozen or so birds were perched along the top of the cliff. the canyon rim along the middle Snake River, near Hagerman, Idaho. There’s no food up there; just old lava rock and some discouraged sagebrush. And a dozen…

Return of Bird of the Week: Cinnamon Flycatcher

Cinnamon Flycatcher, Menu Road, Peru

Without exaggeration, there are hundreds of New World flycatcher species. For this week’s Bird of the Week, we’ll head to the tropics, for one of the prettiest,  the Cinnamon Flycatcher. The cinnamon and brown-green coloration is lovely. It’s fairly common bird on both the east and west slopes of the Andes, from Venezuela down to Bolivia. It’s often seen in mixed flocks and seems to hang around after the rest of the birds have moved along. The species also lets WC show off the difference in image quality in low light between his Canon 1D-X and the old Olympus E-5…

Return of Bird of the Week: Barred Owl

Barred Owl, Bois, Idaho

Maybe WC should call this a Bard Owl: it was photographed on the grounds of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival in Boise, yesterday. Bad puns aside, this species is rare in southeastern Idaho. And controversial. Range expansion into the Pacific Northwest has brought the Barred Owl into contact with the closely related cousin, the Spotted Owl. The more aggressive Barred Owl has been known to displace and even hybridize with the Spotted Owl, a further threat to that already endangered species. This is North America’s third largest owl by size, smaller than the Great Grey Owl and Great-horned Owl. It’s a generalist…

The Return of Bird of the Week — Osprey

For about three years (187 weeks, in fact) WC featured a Bird of the Week post on Saturdays that was cross-posted here at The Mudflats. The idea was to share bird photos with readers, maybe provide a little mostly accurate information about birds, and perhaps sell some bird photos and help pay for WC’s expensive avian photography habit. The series stopped when WC ran out of Alaska bird photos that were decent enough to share. That was about a year ago. After a massive, sometimes tedious review of a chunk of WC’s library of bird photos, WC is feeling inspired. Bird…

​EPA Should Stand its Ground and Protect the World’s Greatest Salmon Runs

Whenever I give presentations outside of Alaska, I always ask the audience, “How many of you like salmon?” Most hands in the room go up. Then I ask, “How many of you have heard of Copper River Reds?” Many of the hands still remain up. But when I ask, “How many of you have heard of Bristol Bay salmon?” almost all hands go down. And then I tell them the odds are 2:1 that they have eaten some. Nearly half of the commercially-caught Sockeye salmon in the world comes from the Bristol Bay region. The science explaining why Bristol Bay is the…

An Aurora Named Steve

I first saw and photographed this phenomenon on August 21, 2014, while shooting the aurora borealis in Portage Valley of the Chugach National Forest with friend and fellow photographer CJ Kale of Lava Light Galleries in Hawaii. The nature of the phenomenon was notably different compared to the typical aurora borealis. It stood straight up from the horizon with a slight bend like a bow, and it pretty much did not move. It had a pale pink hue, and it arced from the west to the east, forming a curved line across the sky. The times I have seen and…