Natural History Journal

While other Americans were out spending billions of dollars shopping on Black Friday, Eric and I spent a beautiful day birding leisurely around two of my favorite local " hotspots ": San Luis and Merced National Wildlife Refuges.  And what an exciting day we had!  To top off our list of nearly 60 species of birds, we saw a couple of real stunners: one rarity - a leucistic Black Phoebe - and one thrilling lifer that took my breath away and left me literally shaking with excitement!  (More to come on that exciting bird very soon!!) Credit for originally finding this leucistic Black Phoebe goes to fellow birder and blogger, Garry Hayes, who spotted this bird (I assume it's the same bird!) about a month ago and wrote about it  on his blog, Geotripper's California Birds .  I thought the unique white Black Phoebe was really neat when he shared the pictures with me last month, but since several weeks had passed, I'd actually completely forgotten about it! ...

Autumn is a beautiful time in California's Great Central Valley: the weather is mild, the winter birds have returned, and the low sun casts a beautiful golden glow over an already golden landscape.  And, ideally, autumn brings the first rain of the season, the first rain we've seen in over six months!  (Still waiting on that rain - hopefully tomorrow it will arrive!) Black-necked Stilts We recently spent a dry, dusty, windy day birding at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, logging over 50 different species and thousands of individual birds.  Thankfully, regardless of rainfall or lack of it, the National Wildlife Refuge system is able to allocate enough water to fill, or at least partially fill, their managed wetlands up and down the Valley.  (This is largely due to the support of waterfowl hunting organizations over the last century or so.)  For when the wetlands fill with water, the birds arrive in droves! Ducks over the wetlands: pintails, s...

The season of long, dark, cold evenings seems to be upon us, even though our autumnal afternoons remain beautifully warm.  Additionally, for the last few weeks I've been battling some sort of nasty virus accompanied by a most persistent cough. As a result, I've been spending more time than usual indoors, my birding adventures limited to watching the birds that visit my backyard feeders.  But the upside, I suppose, is that I've had a chance to do plenty of reading. Over the last two evenings, I enjoyed reading Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (which is not long), along with a couple of his essays on conservation.  He writes of the natural world in such beautiful poetic prose that is somewhat old-fashioned and entirely enchanting - I highly recommend his work! In the late 1940's, naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay The Land Ethic , "It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect...