Natural History Journal

 As an enthusiastic nature-obsessed kid of eleven or twelve, I was utterly over the moon  excited to discover what I knew just had to be a Gray Fox den, hidden in an overgrown, out-of-the-way spot on the park-like campus of our local university.*  There were tracks.  There was scat.  All the signs were there.  It just had to be. Field guide in hand, I read, studied and learned all I could about Gray Foxes ( Urocyon cineteoargenteus ).  I learned that they are North America's only canid with the ability to climb trees.  I learned that they have a varied diet, omnivorous and rather opportunistic, eating whatever is available, from fruits, nuts and insects, to birds and small mammals.  This, I learned, enables them to adapt well to living alongside humans in urban habitats.  More and more clues indicated that the tracks and sign I had discovered must indeed belong to foxes.   Furthermore, I learned that Gray Foxes are most likely...

Fall evenings are fine times to wile away the encroaching hours of darkness by perusing works of great naturalists and conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold.  Tucked at the back of his well-known book,  A Sand County Almanac , are two of Leopold's short essays, The Land Ethic and Marshland Elegy .  Though written over 70 years ago about the marshes of Wisconsin, where Sandhill Cranes breed, Marshland Elegy could just as easily have been written about their winter home in the wetlands and farmlands of California's Great Central Valley. Leopold begins his Elegy with the poetic prose for which he is so beloved, painting the kind of word pictures I love to get lost in. "A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh.  With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass.  Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew.  A single silence hangs f...

Fall is an excellent time to head to California's central coast.  While it is the ideal season to set out on a pelagic birding trip across famed Monterey Bay, simply scoping for seabirds from the rocky headlands of Point Pinos can be productive as well.  If seabirds are out of range, turn your attention to the rocks: a host of shorebirds partial to the rocky coast are sure to delight.   While Long-billed Curlews, Marbled Godwits, Willets, Whimbrels , Sanderlings  and several species of plover  are almost certainly to be found probing sandy beaches and wading in quiet shallows, the five birds presented here are more likely to be found scuttling over barnacle-encrusted rocks just out of reach of the pounding surf. The Black Oystercatcher  ( Heamatopus bachmani ) is a noisy bird, often alerting birders and beach-goers alike to its presence by its shrill call.  Black Oystercatchers are found year-round exclusively along the rocky West Coast of North A...

Fall migration is upon us, that delightful time of year when long-absent birds return, while other familiar feathered friends depart.  Unlike spring migration, fall migration is a rather drawn-out affair in California.  Some shorebirds begin returning from their northerly breeding grounds as early as mid-summer, while some waterfowl delay their trip south until much later in the fall or even mid-winter.  Even so, September is the month that fall migration really begins . But what, exactly, is migration?  Avian migration may be defined as the regular, seasonal, predictable movement of birds, which occurs annually as entire populations travel from their summer breeding habitat to wintering habitat, generally in the pursuit of warmer weather, longer daylight hours, and most importantly, food. Seventy-five percent of North America's breeding birds exhibit a form of migratory behavior, moving to some extent between summer breeding habitat and overwintering habitat...