Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife media release
Free news: Last week in a Corvallis neighborhood, residents worked together to ensure a newborn fawn spotted on a grass strip between a sidewalk and road was left alone. By early evening, its mother returned for her fawn.
Epic arguments between a house wren and a big gopher snake once woke me up at dawn, when the reptile tried to snitch eggs from the little wooden nestbox outside my childhood bedroom window.
Lesser Goldfinches are tiny, thumb-sized creatures, rich green on their backs, gilded dandelion on their breasts, with trim little black caps and splotchy white-and-black wings.
In a bush nearby I’ve been hearing the liquid gabble of practicing Golden-crowned sparrows, fresh from the North. I know they were born this spring because they’re only “singing” these babbly liquid burble sounds, with snatches of barely recognizable sparrow-tune.
I quite like House Sparrows, invasive colonizers though they are. They’re friendly: comic relief from a loaded world of human interactions. They come in about fifty shades of brown, the males with rich black bibs.
In 2020, I watched swallows curling in low flight, as they do before a rainstorm. The air was stagnant, dry, smoke-brown; the sun a pale yellow disk. Wildfires were burning almost 21,000 acres in the United States, mostly in Oregon, Washington and California.
