Tag Archives: birdwatching
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
The one and the many
The birds of summer are arriving, some with dazzling singularity: a white-crowned sparrow perches on a fence picket; a shimmering broad-tailed hummingbird hovers at the sugar water. A suet cake proffered against the damp spring cold lures a black-headed grosbeak and — in a rare and fiery blaze of color — a western tanager. Other birds appear in large groups. I […]
Food chain
If you feed wild birds long enough, you begin to feel as if you are doing something important. Especially during the winter, when the mercury flirts with zero and every natural food source is blanketed in snow, the birds come to depend on your largesse. In return, they reliably offer pleasures only sporadically available in the realm […]
Stocking the feeders
I knew I had become a bona fide geek last weekend, when my to-do list included “make bird feeders.” There I was on a perfectly lovely Sunday afternoon – a warm winter window in which normal people were luxuriating – clutching a 16-inch-long chunk of birch as thick as my arm, a cordless drill and a […]
Soundscape
Thirty generations of birds; three generations of birders. Black-headed grosbeak Sound: William R. Fish, Monterey County, California, April 1953 Image: Cate Terwilliger, Manitou Springs, Colorado, May 2015
Meditatio Ephemera 