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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.

THE GORGE — Two little owls fell out of a tree; one got re-nested, but the other encountered a bb gun and some motor oil, and faces rehabilita…

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One of the birds marked as a “tipping point species” by the 2025 nationwide State of the Birds report is our local resident, the Rufous Hummingbird.

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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.

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WHITE SALMON — The April 11 Wild About Nature talk was "Falconry: Bird Abatement and Captive Breeding by Master Falconer Jimmy Bathke and Appr…

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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.

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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.

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I can’t remember the first time I understood the high clear “SQUEAK!” which means “FLYING PREDATOR!” in ground squirrel language, but I will never forget the day it alerted me to two Bald Eagles flapping and quarreling over a piece of meat, low in the cloudy sky over my home in White Oak forest.

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MOSIER — A few years ago, Mosier naturalist Brian Barrett looked up from his hammock and spotted a flock of slender, dark-brown, four-inch-long birds zooming overhead — all in the same direction. Intrigued, he climbed out for a better look.