Author: boolie

Northern

A female northern flicker searches for breakfast in a meadow on a rainy winter morning at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

A female northern flicker searches for breakfast in a meadow on a rainy winter morning at Ridgefield in 2012. Given its widespread distribution across my country I wrongly assumed this would be the flicker I’d see most often in Arizona, but so far I’ve only seen the gilded flicker. To be fair I’ve only hiked in the desert, perhaps we’ll be reunited when I visit the forests. The two flickers are quite similar both in appearance and call, so in a way it feels like we were never separated.

Smug

A mule deer chews its food along the Chuckwagon Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve in Scottsdale, Arizona

I was walking along the Chuckwagon Trail with the sun about to crest the horizon when the pattern recognition part of my brain thought it saw a distant deer hidden behind some plants. On second glance I was less sure and thought “There you go again, turning trees into deer.” I lifted the telephoto lens to my eye anyway and the tree was a deer, it walked out into the open as it ate soft plants as it strolled along its path, then did the little mule deer hop to move down the hillside.

My pattern recognition self was feeling pretty smug the rest of the hike, even when he was spotting marmots in the rocks though there are no marmots in Arizona. That will take a while to go away, after spending a summer in Florida it took years for me to stop thinking I saw alligators in the marshes of Oregon and Washington. I don’t mind, the successes are worth the failures, and if you don’t look you can’t see.

In Memory of Porter

Our neighbor's dog Porter comes running to meet me in heavy snow in December 2008

In December 2008 we got an unusually heavy snow in Portland. You can draw a direct line between the day I took this picture and the day we adopted our dog Ellie. Our neighbor’s dog Porter saw me and came running over to say hello as he always did, always with the same enthusiasm, so I took a few pictures then put the camera down and played with him. He loved catching snowballs in the air and I so enjoyed my time with him that it got me thinking about getting a dog of our own. I had never given it much thought as I think our cat Templeton would have been miserable with a dog around. But he had died a year prior, and our three cats at the time had all met Porter and seemed fine with him, so my wife and I discussed it and a couple of weeks later we brought home Ellie.

Porter was always eager to see me the entire time we lived there, old age eventually slowed the speed at which he’d come bounding over but it never touched his enthusiasm. He loved to run back and forth across the yard with me and he loved to be petted. He was well loved by his family and lived a good long life until his health rapidly declined recently. I will always be grateful for this sweet pup, not just for his role in bringing Ellie into our lives, but for every time he made my world brighter just by saying hello.

Rib Cage

A close-up view of the ribs of a dead saguaro along the Chuckwagon Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve

Supporting the massive weight of a saguaro is a circular skeleton of woody ribs that sometimes remains standing after the cactus dies. I photographed this lovely example in the soft light before sunrise near the start of the Chuckwagon Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Hiking the Chuckwagon to the Watershed Trail and up to the Cholla Mountain Loop Trail to see The Amphitheater and Cathedral Rock has become one of my favorite desert hikes, although I’ll mix it up with the Latigo, Vaquero, and Maverick trails too.

I Have Departed and I Will Remain

A dead tree stands near a saguaro along the Whiskey Bottle Trail in McDowell Sonoran Preserve in Scottsdale, Arizona

Most of the branches have broken off this long-dead tree but still it reaches for the sky. In life it wouldn’t have approached the heights of the massive saguaros that dominate the landscape but it would have provided welcome shade for young plants trying to gain a foothold in the desert. In death it can provide some shade and shelter, every little bit helps as while the hills and vegetation behind me are providing some protection from the sun at this early hour, as the sun rises there will be little escaping its glare. Yet life flourishes in this desert, it is not the emptiness of sand and rock I imagined in my youth.

Let’s Get Outside

Our cat Trixie sits in a cardboard box from my hiking shoes emblazoned with the slogan Let's Get Outside

“Let’s Get Outside” is an apt slogan for my hiking shoes but not for little Squeaks who, like all our cats, is indoors only. She doesn’t spend much time in cardboard boxes, sometimes I think she tries it just to understand why brother Boo loves them so.

Searching for Meaning

Our cat Boo looks out the picture window of the dining room of our house in Portland, Oregon

Boo looks out from the picture window in the dining room of our old house in Portland. This morning I noticed the door of one of the kitchen cabinets was moving on its own and suddenly out popped Boo. He quickly figured out how to open the cabinets after we moved here and one has become a favorite. Look inside and you’ll see he’s made a cozy space surrounded by reading materials like Catwoman comics and the writings of Heraclitus. I need to put an end to it because you’re not getting back to sleep when someone wakes you up at 3 a.m. to ask you why you cannot step twice in the same river.