We have six large hummingbird feeders surrounding our house in Northern California but we also have several flower beds and native plants that the hummingbirds enjoy. As I sat on my back porch last weekend, contemplating mowing the native grasses surrounding the house and having some breakfast and my morning coffee, the hummers were all […]
After we finished Blackpoint Drive this past Saturday, we drove out to Scrub Ridge Trail to look for Scrub Jays. I first visited this area in 2010, and during my first view visits, I would usually find them, but they seemed to take no interest in me. A couple years ago, though, all that began […]
Striking, beautiful, bizarre, fascinating – all are adjectives used to describe Florida’s iconic Roseate Spoonbill (Platalea ajaja). The pink color of it’s feathers is diet-derived, from carotinoid pigments. Spoonbills wade through the shallows, swishing their spoon shaped bills from side to side…feeding on crustaceans, aquatic insects, frogs, newts and small fish. Hunted almost to extinction […]
There’s been a marked decline in the number of sunspots over the past decade or so. That’s what NASA scientists say, and I have no reason to doubt their research findings. Luckily, I haven’t observed any reduction in the terrestrial version of this phenomenon. Hardly a day has passed lately when I’ve not been blinded […]
This Spring is surely the one to be reminded as one of the least stable migration we had for years down in the Arava. While some morning start in full swing and there seems to be birds on every bush in the Arava and the sky are filled with migrating raptors, we have many mornings […]
The last few weeks have been pretty busy for me with lots of tours and finding lots of migratory birds. This year’s early rain through the month of March was extreme but all along we knew that it would be a spectacular spring and hence have been rewarded with carpets of amazing multicoloured blooms covering […]
Myocastor coypus (Camargue) – Rodentia – Myocastoridae – It can reach a weight of 12 to 14 kg! It lives in burrows alongside stretches of water. They waste close to 90% of the river plants they feed on eating only the stems, a destructive feeding and burrowing behavior but… that is not the full extent […]
Welcome! hello there! I’d write more but my hands are frozen and typing is no fun (excuses, excuses, eh? Mmhmm)! Yeah…Texas, what? 35 degrees this morning? I do not approve. I’m craving my happy-thriving temperature of 84 and above. This 30’s thing this is pretty unacceptable. I’m not made for this nonsense, guys! But hey, […]