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 angry times like these, we all need a little comic relief. Fortunately, America’s number-one game bird is once again, with comical inefficiency, building nests for the first of its six or so broods in the Western desert, as it has since the Pleistocene.
Although she will never hatch a chick, the female bald eagle housed at Columbia Gorge Discovery Center & Museum nests annually with her partner, Ferguson, said Raptor Coordinator Julia Khoury.
As I’ve grown up, the formal human holidays became less and less important every year. There’s so many things about Christmas we can’t control: prices, family politics, the weather. Instead, I look forward to those spontaneously perfect days when nature’s stars align — the winter’s most beautiful snowstorm, the day I saw a bobcat carry a limp, spotted ground squirrel past me in its mouth; and the month I’ll forever remember as “coyote summer” — the wild holidays come without warning, and leave a larger mark.
THE GORGE — On Christmas Eve, President Biden signed a bill officially designating the bald eagle as the U.S.’s national bird. Already considered the national symbol, the species had never received this official designation.