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.
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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.
WHITE SALMON — The April 11 Wild About Nature talk was "Falconry: Bird Abatement and Captive Breeding by Master Falconer Jimmy Bathke and Appr…
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.
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.
When I was small, we went to the beach. Sand-blinded by wind, we staggered around beside the vast gray ocean, picking up bits of shell embedded in the sand. The biggest disappointment of my first meeting with the sea was a sad lack of sandpipers.
DALLESPORT — On July 6, a bald eaglet took flight at Horsethief Lake in Dallesport, Washington. Shortly after taking flight, the eaglet got caught upside down in a tree, hanging by one talon.
