Scratcher of heads, rubber of bellies
One of my favorite rites of spring when we lived in the Northwest was listening to the savannah sparrows sing in the meadows. I met this one on an Easter morning 12 years ago, I had to wait a while to get the picture as it spent most of its time facing the other direction, singing to the other sparrows.
Twelve years ago on a cloudy spring morning at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge I came across this muskrat eating the grasses at the edge of one of the lakes or ponds. I don’t remember where exactly and my notes back then were rather sparse and don’t provide any clues.
A song sparrow peaks out of the marsh on a rainy October morning at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. They are year round residents here in Arizona as well but I’ve yet to see one, though to be fair I’ve only been hiking in the local desert environment.
A Pacific treefrog sits vertically in a moss-covered tree, all soaked with rain on an October morning, beside the trail to the observation blind at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. I was crestfallen when I realized I had forgotten my tripod and wouldn’t be able to photograph the frog (and another nearby on the same tree), but then I remembered I had my adapter to put Canon lenses on my Sony camera and thus was able to use both my Canon macro lens and the image stabilization of the Sony. It saved the day and thankfully so, it turned out to be the last time I saw them before leaving the Northwest.
A juvenile red-tailed hawk perches along the auto tour at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in 2010. We have redtails here in Arizona but I don’t get to see them up close like this anymore. Even at Ridgefield it seemed like in the later years I no longer saw them perching so close, so often, although I could still see them nearby in the meadows.
Bitterns can look like a football with a head attached so it always amazed me when they’d stand and stretch their necks up, and up, and up. Useful for seeing over tall grasses and also as a defensive pose, I saw them do it multiple times when bald eagles soared high overhead, although the subterfuge worked best when the grasses were brown instead of green. I was never quite sure how they distinguished the distant eagles from other birds of prey but I did a quick check of the skies if a bittern I had been watching suddenly struck a thin vertical pose.
Green-winged and cinnamon teal were easy to see at Ridgefield but not so the blue-wings, so it was a special treat to find this lovely fellow in the dew-topped grasses growing in Horse Lake early on a spring morning in 2011. I spent the day at the little refuge, arriving at 6:30am and leaving at 5:30pm.
After moving to Arizona I have fallen in love with having a swimming pool in the backyard, swimming has become second only to hiking as my favorite way to exercise in the summer heat, even though I’ll never look as lovely in the water as this northern pintail swimming in Ruddy Lake 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.
Boolie 