I’ve just returned home from a four-week trip to Peru, my first honest-to-goodness vacation to this amazing country. I have traveled in Peru apart from leading tours a few times, but in those “early years” (my first time to Peru was only less than 13 years ago), every trip counted as a scouting trip, and every observation was still a new and valuable experience directly applicable to knowledge I needed to feel like a competent birding tour leader. This time though, there were virtually no strings attached to my simply enjoying birds, bugs, plants, and all kinds of natural history, though I di ..read more

I participated on three Christmas Bird Counts this year – lower than my typical average of seven to nine, because I was away for 12 days for my Oaxaca at Christmastime tour in the middle of the period. There are still two more days left to this 2021-22 Christmas Bird Count season, but being weekdays, they weren’t chosen by many compilers. (If you’re reading this last minute, the Redmond CBC is being held on Wednesday, January 5.) Weather-wise it’s a good thing though; this last weekend saw relatively good weather, while today it’s raining cats and dogs nonstop, and that’s the forecast for the ..read more

My recent 18-day tour to Brazil may have been more about mushrooms, but there’s a lot to look at in the Amazon rainforest. These beetles I photographed below are a good example. Most people have heard that beetles are the most speciose group of animals in the world, but some experts have been saying recently they may be outnumbered by wasps. Most are so tiny you would never notice them, but the big, showy ones – let’s call them macrobeetles – are diverse and beautiful enough to elicit an “inordinate fondess” from any biologist. I only started paying much attention to beetles because of my frie ..read more

I’ve just returned home from an 18-day private tour with a single client to Brazil, from southern Amazonia to the northern Pantanal, crossing the great watershed divide between the central Atlantic (Amazon River) and southern Atlantic (Paraná River). My tour participant, Susanne Sourell, is actually a very advanced amateur fungus expert, and we’ve been on several tours together. She knows much more about finding and identifying fungi than I do, so I while I was often able to help find them and co-marvel in their amazing beauty and diversity, I pointed out birds, plants, and all kinds of other ..read more

When I came home from three weeks in Brazil earlier this week, I was expecting (and sort of hoping) that the Pacific Northwest would be winterish already. With the garden all dormant and harvests completely done, the gradual tasks of cleaning up spent plants and all the gardening infrastructure (trellises, stakes, twine, and the watering timer system) can begin. But practically the only winterish thing in my yard are the peach trees, which have truly lost most of their leaves. They must respond more to dwindling daylength than temperatures. But not elsewhere in the garden – while the wint ..read more

I’ve been home just two days from my two wonderful tours to southeastern Peru, and I while I was excited to see how my garden has progressed (or aged, as the case may be) as fall approaches, I was also not quite ready to leave Peru. I wish I had had just a few more days to explore more trails and squeeze out a few more species. The rainy season was just barely starting, and plants were beginning bloom, birds were nesting, and more insects were emerging. My second tour visits two rainforest lodges of the department Madre de Dios. It was an abrupt but delightful change of pace from the first Per ..read more

I’m leading my first international tours since the start of the pandemic, and everything is going exceedingly well. The first tour just finished a week ago, where we visited the Machu Picchu and the Manu-Kosñipata road, all in the department of Cusco. Some of the lodges and hotels were running with a much-reduced staff, still rebuilding since opening back up to international tourists in July, but you wouldn’t have known it. Clean rooms, excellent meals, and well-maintained trails greeted us at every stop. We hit the ground running with a full day in the high wetlands near Cusco and superb bird ..read more

This blog isn’t dead yet – I’m still here and do have lots to share. I have much that I could have been blogging about these past three months – so much that the idea of catching up seems too overwhelming a task to even start on. But here I am, and I can’t let the amazing White-crowned Sparrow migration I witnessed in the yard this past spring go undocumented. I’ll briefly review the subspecies of White-crowned Sparrows we have in Oregon and then share some photos from the phenomenal migration of Gambel’s White-crowned Sparrows that birders experienced in western Oregon in mid-April this ..read more

The Sound Quiz I posted the day before yesterday is a Purple Finch. This was given by an adult male Purple Finch, which had been perched next to the female, and both were giving call notes. The female flew to a tree about 20 meters away, and the male then began a series of soft call notes and subsongs. The subsong is often just a softened version of the long song, incorporating just a bit of mimicry, so I thought this one was unusual in being rather loud and having no Purple Finch sounds at all. Twelve species were mentioned in the answers I received from my post to Oregon Birders On Line, and ..read more

I posted this song quiz to Oregon Birders Online, and it's been fun to see how different people hear it. I'll add the ID and my analysis tomorrow. I recorded it in my Eugene back yard on the morning of March 30 and saw the bird, so I know what it is ..read more