Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
Ellie and I playing catch with a tennis ball at the dog park at Irving Park in the fall of 2011. She couldn’t go off-leash when we adopted her in 2009 but with a desire to please and a desire for treats she was pretty easy to train and soon enough was able to zoom around the park.
Usually I see woodpecker nests in vertical saguaro arms but this male and his mate had chosen an angled arm. At 5:20 am with the sun about to rise they were already bringing food to the nest, in this case a moth. Given the angle to the sun I wasn’t sure if the light would illuminate them when the sun came up or if the saguaro would cast them in shadow, and I still don’t know, as while they brought food to the nest at first they started holding back. Raising young is precarious and stressful enough so while I suspected they would quickly come to not see me as a threat I didn’t want to risk it and continued up the trail.
On my first trips to Yellowstone I knew I’d love the animals but I was surprised by how much I came to love the hot springs. It was this little part of Mammoth Hot Springs, taken from the Beaver Ponds Trail, that not only spurred on a desire to photograph the springs but to look for what I call little landscapes but are more commonly called intimate landscapes, small scenes inside of larger ones. Thankfully on my first visit I photographed it both in the evening light and in the soft diffuse light after the sun dropped behind the hills (shown here), as when I went back in later years the mineral deposits had changed and this spot lost its color.
Yellowstone was a long drive from Portland so I only went every handful of years, it’s further away now and there’s so much of the Southwest I want to explore that I’m not sure when I’ll go back, but I’ll always treasure each of my visits there, I’ve never been anyplace like it. I used to tease myself that I should visit once and only bring a macro lens and take nothing but close-ups of all the things I could never see at home but of course with so much wildlife on display I never did it.
One of these American bison calves was enjoying playtime more than the other.
I had only been in Arizona for three weeks when I met this molting greater earless lizard on the Tom’s Thumb Trail. As I was photographing it a young woman pointed out the lizard to the man hiking with her but he shrugged his shoulders and kept going. Probably that’s nature’s way of telling her that he isn’t worth her time but I suppose there is a remote possibility that you could both be a wonderful person and not fascinated by lizards.
From 2010, resting in her cat bed on my desk. She was were she always wanted to be, beside me.
In Portland I had a cheap love seat with a large matching ottoman that all the pets could join me on, but since it wasn’t in great shape we didn’t bring it to Arizona. However we also didn’t want to replace it until we were in our permanent home and knew the size and shape of my office, so in the rental house I used my wife’s old futon. It was comfortable to sit on, and inadvertently sleep on, but there was less room for cats. When they did sleep on my legs outstretched on a coffee table even little Trixie, 8 pounds soaking wet, was putting too much pressure on my knees. We found a nice used sofa with an attached chaise lounge at a secondhand store that was a good size for my office and the cats have enjoyed having room to snuggle up again, no one more so than Sam.
I told Boo he wasted his money as the leg extenders he ordered online wouldn’t actually make his legs longer and boy do I have egg on my face.
Flowers bloom atop a barrel cactus along the Chuckwagon Trail in May of 2018. I photographed several different barrels blooming last year but this year I didn’t see any that struck my fancy, perhaps I was too distracted by hawks and lizards and woodpeckers. The circle of buds and blossoms at the top reminds me of a candy dish full of brightly colored candies, we have a small one in the backyard with what looks like some buds just starting to form, I’m curious to see if it will bloom this summer.
I’ve never seen a bird not defend its nest so I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. With one Harris’s hawk on its nest in a saguaro, multiple other adults were perched nearby, in trees, on saguaros, on large electrical towers. They called out repeatedly but to my untrained eyes and ears it seemed like they were keeping in touch rather than warning to keep away.
What was I seeing? Perhaps what I needed to see, what I wished for rather than what was, with Ellie’s death still stinging. But in this case both as I learned later Harris’s hawks live in family groups, even during nesting season with new life about to come into the world.
A week ago after sunup this adult flew to the nest, one leg outstretched to find purchase on a saguaro blossom while the other clutched twigs to spruce up the nest, as the two nestlings watched from the nest (they’re hard to see). Was it the father arriving? The mother? A sibling?
This morning one of the young hawks was continuously jumping from one arm to the other, working on its balance and testing its wings. I didn’t see the other until it flew over and landed awkwardly in a palo verde below the nest, having already fledged.
What joy these hawks, this family, have brought to me this spring as they add two more to their number.
