WC might have mentioned that he heated with wood for the 3.5 years when he owned a home above Ester, Alaska on Ester Dome. The house had electric heat, but no one could afford to heat with electricity. The big, drafty, modified A-Frame WC had purchased could go through eight cords of seasoned wood in…
Among birders’ favorite hummingbirds has to be the Violet-bellied. Not only is the male’s coloration spectacular; this species favors the flowers of the understory, making it more accessible than most hummingbirds. And it is sometimes attracted to feeders. It’s a handsome bird from this angle, but when it catches the light right, well. It can…
Commentary / Family / Obituary
WC lost his sister-in-law, his brother’s wife, Laurie DeWitt, yesterday. She was a sweet, smart, wonderful woman and the world is a poorer and darker with her gone. She fought a six year battle with lung cancer that had spread throughout her entire body before it was even discovered. Throughout that struggle, she showed unimaginable…
On November 3, 2002, just a little after noon, WC was upstairs at his home in Fairbanks, working on his email. Mrs. WC was downstairs doing chores. The whole house gave a very strong, sudden and sharp jerk. There was a pause. And then continuously, for two minutes and 18 seconds, the house thrashed around…
The last two days, WC’s backyard has been filled with Western Tanagers. This is not normal. There have been as many as 20-25 birds present at one time. It’s a treat to see these brilliantly colored birds, of course. It would be more of a treat if it weren’t raining most of the time under…
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was tried by the inquisition, charged with suspicion of heresy. He was forced to recant his theory that the Earth orbited the Sun. Catholic Church dogma said the Sun orbited the Earth. Legend has it that after he recanted, while still in the presence of the Inquisitor, he muttered, “E pur si muove“ (“And yet…
WC has written before about this summer working on the R/V Acona for the University of Alaska’s Institute of Marine Science. One of the research projects involved a trip to Lituya Bay, in the northwestern part of of Southeast Alaska. In 1958, an earthquake and consequent landslide created what was then the largest tsunami –…
WC isn’t a serious lister. A serious lister is a birder who focuses – maybe over-focuses – on the lists of birds seen. But WC does keep a life list. Recently, doing a bit of research on the family of birds called Rallidae WC discovered that the Clapper Rail had been split into three species:…
WC has written about Sora before, and the difficulties of photographing them. Sora are rails, a clade of birds that are famously secretive. Sora are probably the most widely distributed of the North American rails. You hear them much, much more often than you see them. The Sora takes its name from one of its…
There are eight species of Brilliants; WC has photos of four of them. If anything, this species iseven more territorial and belligerent than its Fawn-breasted cousin. This male is making a threat display against a rival or another hummingbird. WC has more than two dozen photos of this hummingbird reacting in this way. So, yeah,…
WC mentioned that he saw an astonishing number of Lewis’s Woodpeckers on his last road trip. One bird was especially memorable as it struggled with a series of pressing problems in front of a bemused WC and Mrs. WC. The bird had found or maybe excavated a nice-looking cavity in a Ponderosa Pine snag. Lewis’s…
WC and Mrs. WC were driving along one of our favorite county backroads recently when we saw this: This photo was taken with WC’s backup camera, with a 35-135mm lens, zoomed to 135mm. The crane has nested just across the roadside ditch, less than three feet from the edge of the road. The photo was…
