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 [...]

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 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: [...]

On January’s full moon — the closest moon to Earth in two years — we discovered a ringtail in the tree near the Civano neighborhood center. Fortunately, I had my camera nearby, and was able to spend some time with our neighbor. Check out the gallery for all 19 of the photos; here are a [...]

About ten days ago, when the girls and I were on our Colorado trip, Billie mentioned some bee activity in the backyard, near the door to the garage. When I came home I noticed that bees were flying in and out of a small gap where the back porch roof meets the flat garage wall. [...]

Charles Darwin is known more for his detailing of finches on the Galapagos than of his work with hawks (if any), but hawks and Darwin are on my mind this week and next. First, we had a Cooper’s hawk visit our yard the other day: He started at the bird feeder, which I had just [...]

This weekend my friend Scott Calhoun, my younger daughter, and I ventured through the gate of Fort Huachuca army base at the foot of southeastern Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains, which climb to nearly 9,500 feet and edge into Mexico. We had a wonderful time climbing through Garden Canyon and taking lots and lots of photographs of [...]

Before my recent trip to Denver (look for photos from that over the next week or so), I spent consecutive weekends at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum with my daughters. First my older daughter and a friend attended a Saturday Summer Evening, where we get to shine blacklights in search of scorpions and have loads of [...]

A few photos from the family zoo outing yesterday (more available in the gallery): Our daughters in the Reid Park Zoo’s new “Get Wet” area. Checking out the rhino. Snuggling, giraffe style. Observing the zebras. Caiman lurking in the (not so) deep. View all 23 photos here.