Our red-tailed hawk chicks are growing bigger every day, and trading fluff for feathers as well. Their bodies are almost completely feathered by now, which makes their heads look small and strange, as though the heads are developing more slowly than the rest of the body. Given that the head is where the brain is…
Birds
The good father
In case you were wondering, here’s what our red-tailed hawk nest looks like from our deck: See that little red circle? That’s the nest. Without the spotting scope, even with binoculars it’s hard to find. WITH the spotting scope, we can spy on the nest from our deck. And using a nifty gadget that clips…
Feeding babies
For the past several weeks we have been watching a pair of nesting red-tailed hawks across the canyon. They built a nest in a eucalyptus tree, then the female began incubating a clutch of eggs. The male would bring her food and spell for short stints on the nest, while we spied on them through…
Sea and sky
As a native Californian, I’ve been living with drought my entire life. Well, maybe not so much during the El Niño of 1997-98, but even then the thought “We have water now but might not later…” was always in the back of my mind. This season we had a great few weeks of rain in…
In all her glory
This afternoon I was enjoying the sunshine and watching the small finchy birds flitting about in the big coffeeberry bush off our back deck. I call this bush the “conference bush” because every spring the birds congregate in it and chatter to each other like conventioneers. When the bush blooms it becomes populated with foraging…
Cups vs. gourds
A couple of months ago I posted about the vernal equinox and the arrival of spring as heralded by the return of the swallows to the marine lab. This spring I’ve been keeping an eye on the mud nests that have been going up under the eaves of one of the buildings. It seemed to…
True signs of spring
The astronomical onset of spring is the vernal equinox, which this year occurred on Thursday 20 March 2014. The date is determined by the movements of the Earth and the sun, and occurs regardless of weather conditions anywhere on the planet. Some people look to plants for an indication of spring: the first day that…
Dudes, dudettes, and dudelets
We are fortunate to have a lot of wildlife in our backyard, which is actually a canyon. On any given day we can look out and see finches and hummingbirds squabbling over their respective feeders, jays trying to steal whatever they can, and hawks either swooping through the brush or soaring overhead. The soundtrack of…
Sex and real estate
We are still about a few days away from the vernal equinox, but it is impossible to mistake the signs of spring: Trees are blooming (gesundheit!), bees are buzzing, and birds are singing. In our canyon, the California quail have disbanded their large winter covey and are foraging in male-female pairs. In the past few…
Albatrosses
Sometimes even a naturalist gets to go on vacation, and I was fortunate enough to get to spend a week in Kaua’i. My favorite spot on the island was the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on the north shore of the island, where I got to see albatrosses, frigatebirds, and boobies in flight, as well as…