Natural History Journal

There is a spot, not too far from here, where a lazy brown river once meandered sleepily across an oak-studded grassland, swelling with spring snowmelt to flood vast freshwater marshes with life-giving water.   The natural seasonal rhythms of that once-wild river have been massively altered in the last century, its flood stemmed by upstream dams as agricultural development took hold on the fertile floodplains and now-dry oxbows.  With the water went the ecosystems it supported, and where once wide swaths of jungle-like riparian forests teemed with wildlife, there was now bare tilled earth.   But nature has her own way, and every now and then, the river still out-maneuvered its engineers, as floodwaters topped the riverbanks, eager to return to their former floodplains - gone, perhaps, but not forgotten by the river.   A few farmers eventually admitted defeat, selling their river-flooded dairy land to the federal government.  The San Joaquin River ...

On February 2nd, a very lost bird joined a flock of common, everyday Mourning Doves at a backyard feeder in Palo Alto, California.  But this was no ordinary lost bird, and it was certainly no ordinary backyard that it chose to plop down in.  As fate would have it, this very lost bird just so happened to land in the backyard of a wildlife biologist and birder who was able to identify it as an extremely rare vagrant, an Oriental Turtle-Dove from East Asia.   When I first heard about this bird, I assumed it was another Mandarin Duck -type situation: an escaped exotic from a zoo or private aviary, pretty to look at but otherwise... kind of ho-hum, from a birder's perspective.  (Only truly wild birds "count," you remember.)  But as the rare bird alerts began pouring in and articles started popping up on the internet, it occurred to me... this was nothing like the exotic duck situation!   This was a much, much bigger deal. No, it doesn't look like much...