Bird Notes Afield

During the Perseid meteor shower, the high Sierra is one of the best places to see stars shooting across the night sky. Even at nights when the moon shines brightly, you can still be astonished by a few brilliant meteors streaking overhead. In 2015, the situation was different. Wild fires on the other side of the Sierra sent smoke over high peaks, and veiled the sun during the day and the stars during the night. I was in Dusy Basin with my camping pal at the time; one morning we found specks of fine ash covering the ground, the lake and our tents. We didn’t see any meteor that August. But we saw something else that delighted us. We departed on a smoke-filled day. Before sunrise, August 17, 2015. On our way out, we could smell the scorched wood in the air as we climbed up from the lake where we had camped for several days and headed toward Bishop Pass. It was our habit to avoid the dusty trail whenever we could in the wilderness. So we threaded our way in a gradual upslope hik...

On the Fourth of July this year a young Osprey died. A week later a young Peregrine Falcon died. The two incidents took place just a few miles from each other. Both birds were less than two months old, and had taken their first flights under watchful eyes of humans. Local Audubon Society had two cameras on the osprey nest, and volunteers were posted by the tower where the peregrine was hatched. I had a brief encounter with Lux (the juvenile falcon that died later) on the evening of July 5, the day before she took her first leap into the air. She was on Campanile, the clock tower at the center of UC Berkeley campus. The tower rose 307 feet against the blue sky, showed its usual serene façade, and revealed nothing about a raptor's nest until the insistent high-pitched scratchy calls near the top broke through the summer lull. Even with one ear plugged up due to a cold, I could hear her loud and clear. In all three photos above, the female adult Peregrine Falcon stands at ...