Photo by Simmons B. Buntin (2006), though the ad just came out.

We had a wonderful field trip to the Sweetwater Wetlands water treatment facility for our “Birds & Poems” course Saturday morning. Here are a few photos, but check out the full gallery of 39 images — both poets and birds — here. A northern shoveler stretches his wings. A red-winged blackbird eyes me as I [...]

In July I had the honor and good fortune of accompanying 11 other writers, and about 100 scientists, to the Mount St. Helens Science Pulse, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, to study and discuss the post-eruption landscape 30 years after its last major [...]

Over Father’s Day weekend I camped at the 9,000-foot Hospital Flats campground atop Mt. Graham in eastern Arizona with my younger daughter. I took the photos in color, but as I began to optimize them for their galleries, I realized they are just as intriguing in black-and-white. So I’ve created two galleries, one each in [...]

Summer Saturday evenings are back on at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. This weekend my daughters and I made the trip over, and though it was a bit chilly (relatively speaking), we still got to shine some scorpions and see lots of other critters and plants. Here are a sampling of colorful evening abstracts from the [...]

On Sunday we took a drive into the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson under the auspices of a daylong Girl Scout retreat. That was all good and fun, but the trip also presented the opportunity to photograph Rose Canyon Lake and some amazing desert wildflowers we saw on the way up. Here are a [...]

On Saturday my younger daughter and I drove 60 miles west to Kitt Peak National Observatory, located on the Tohono O’odham reservation. Ostensibly I was looking for wildflowers — ’tis the season and all — but mostly I wanted to hang out with my excellent little traveling companion and goggle at the big telescopes atop [...]

On Friday I skipped work to take my daughters hiking with a group of neighbors up the Babad Do’ag Trail, which starts at the first pullout on Catalina Highway once the road starts climbing the Santa Catalinas. It was a beautiful, wildflower-filled day, and the 4-mile roundtrip trail was just right. Here are a few [...]

The Whitewater Draw Wildlife Area lies at the south end of the McNeal Playa, 20 miles north of Douglas, Arizona, and the Mexico border. At the northeastern edge of the grasslands-dominated Chihuahua desert, the area attracts about 30,000 Sandhill cranes — from separate Rocky Mountain and Mid-Continent populations — every winter, generally from November through [...]

On January 31 I visited the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum with visitors from out of town. Of course, I seemed to only take photos of wildlife, the grounds, and my daughters. No surprise there. Here are a few of the shots, and a total of 28 can be found in larger format over in my gallery: [...]