I was honored to contribute to the 2020 Texas Birds Annual Magazine of the Texas Ornithological Society (TOS). This spring, during my jaunt through Texas I was sharing my blogs with Texas birders. After settling into my Brownsville RV park at Breeze Lake, I was contacted with an email from editor Jack Eitniear. He explained … Read more
Does hate exist? From a philosophical perspective, a case could be made about the non-existence of things negative (hate being the negative of love). In short, the argument goes that if a quality can only be described by the absence of its opposite, then it doesn’t exist on its own merits. A defender of this … Read more
For a report on my December 2015 health crisis, read <This Post>. The last health report I posted was short on facts. Important information has since been revealed that explains my symptoms better than were previously understood. Recap: I’d been experiencing a nagging cough for two weeks, so last Tuesday I visited Urgent Care with … Read more
For the past two weeks or more, I’ve been experiencing a slight cough for several minutes after starting a horizontal vacation. In the beginning, these coughs were mild and didn’t require me to open my mouth. I dismissed these episodes as unmeaningful, as I wasn’t feeling that poorly, though there was some fatigue that was … Read more
I’ve been busy cataloging images from my Texas expedition and updating the bird galleries on the Birds I Have Known pages. It was a lot of work but I’ve just finished. There are 153 updated species galleries, and 43 of them are new. The trip for me was rewarding on so many levels, and trying … Read more
One benefit of taking a lengthy journey, such as my 2020 Texas Expedition, is collecting images of new bird species for my species galleries. If I’ve met the bird before, I can add the new images and show a new region to display on the integrated gallery maps showing where I’ve met all the subjects … Read more
After leaving Arivaca Wednesday morning I drove a rural route through Ajo and Gila Bend to Yuma where I spent the night. Thursday morning after having breakfast I launched the last leg of my return from my 2020 Texas Expedition. I crossed the Colorado River and was back on California soil, and already missing the … Read more
After my visit to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum on Tuesday morning, I drove south 170 miles to Arivaca. The route I chose was not conventional and I passed through Three Points where AZ-86 connects to AZ-286 and headed south towards Sasabe. I turned east on the Arivaca-Sasabe Road and traversed this rough, pot-hole ridden road … Read more
Travel fifty-four miles east from the I-10 freeway on US-60 in Phoenix, and just 3 miles short of Superior Arizona is a jewel of a location for nature lovers called the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Named for an early 20th Century strip-mining magnet, I find it ironic that a man guilty of causing some of the … Read more
Two corrections: Thanks to the astute observations of readers Celestyn Brozek and Lori Conrad, I’ve learned my “Cassin’s Vireo” is the wrong Solitary Vireo. The proper identification is Plumbeous Vireo. And to Jeff Brake for pointing out that Mount Graham, while the tallest in Southern Arizona, is not the second highest, but the 14th highest … Read more
