A young man is wheeled into surgery on a gurney. He was gravely injured in an auto accident that killed his father. The young man is transferred to the operating table and prepped for emergency surgery. The surgeon leans over the young man and gasps in dismay, “Oh, my son, what have the done to you?”…
Birding is harder in the fall. A lot of birds look very different in the autumn; Blackpoll Warblers, for example, look like completely different species. Yes, that really is the same bird species. But the juveniles are even worse. Hatch years birds may not look anything like their parents. And among hatch year birds, sparrows…
In comparison to the tannin-stained Sandhill Cranes of Alaska, Idaho’s breeding population is immaculate. They seem just a bit smaller, too. But they still offer the same crane music that heralds autumn. WC is mostly off the intertubes this weekend, chasing birds and dodging heat waves.
This male Mountain Bluebird is a little worn, soon to molt into fresh feathers. Take this image and the Thoreau quote that is the blog post title as a metaphor for our times.
Mutualism is the way two organisms of different species each benefits from the activity of the other. The different species could exist independently of each other, but have evolved a relationship by which both benefit. The Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis) is a high altitude pine tree, whose range includes the Idaho batholith. In those latitudes, it only…
As WC mentioned a while ago, he chased the solar eclipse. And caught it! Now it’s not as if WC was the only one to take photos. Or write about it afterwards. The internet is saturated with photos and prose, ranging from pretty good to pretty dreadful, extolling the 2017 North American Eclipse. The best…
California Quail – the state bird of its namesake – are the most common quail of the American West. From Western Utah to the Pacific, outside of mountainous terrain, you can hear the silly, nasal “put way do” calls and see them scurry along the ground. While they lost a lot of range to agriculture,…
