As the year winds down, a last three month’s of photos

25 Dec As the year winds down, a last three month’s of photos

Posted from Seattle December 25, 2025 (Christmas)

This has frustrated some friends (and given them headaches!), but for me being in focus is not the highest priority in photography. I look for shots that teach me things I didn’t know or make me realize how beautiful something is that I didn’t quite realize before.

This Red-tailed Hawk came in low over the high expanse of Jefferson Park on Beacon Hill in Seattle on December 22. Note the way the front of the bird morps from dark brown to orange-buffy to white with longitudinal stripes. I don’t think I would have expected that those areas were so demarcated or that the Bird would look so robust and strong. Sometimes Reds appear to have a large wing area–Birds that are soaring. This bird, which was gliding, appears very wing-loaded with a small area of wing. I found the photo surprising and it was one of the most popular photos I’ve put on Nextdoor in the last two years, in spite of the fact that it is a common Bird and not in great focus.

Another favorite shot of 2025. This male Pileated Woodpecker was foraging in close company with a female in Seward Park, Seattle in October. I always thought Pileateds were great, I maybe am blown away by how beautiful in this case. I think this could be maybe the best photograph I ever took. I am so glad my old Powershot died and I had to replace it with a new Powershot.

A Common Crane spent time just west of Elma and East of Brady loop this fall. This Dec. 6. The Common Crane, a Bird that is widely distributed in Europe, Asia, NE Africa, China and India occasionally strays into North America for its winter vacation. No one could tell us for sure if this was a hoped-for romance as one very young Sandhill Crane attached itself to the Bird for the duration. Here’s hoping the best for both of them and no tears.

This Red-winged was at Lake Ballinger on Dec 14 acting like it was spring. We didn’t know there was a nice wetland at the upper end of the Lake and had never been there. We found a relatively colorful Swamp Sparrow that had been reported there but I couldn’t get a good shot. They always feel very skittish in Western WA, whereas I don’t remember them as at all skittish in Pennsylvania in the 60s so I decided it might be the abundance of the larger, intolerant Song Sparrows here which relentlessly attack them whenever they perch up high.

We spent two weeks in the middle of November in the New Mexico bootheel house of my parents-in-law. One day we drove east across the bootheel and found a couple Lawrence’s Goldfinch, a lifebird for New Mexico for me and a pure Lifebird for Delia.

Soras are rarely seen Birds; they don’t often venture out in the open when they don’t have to. This Sora was swimming like a duck (didn’t know they did that) on Cochise Lake in Willcox AZ on our way in from the Tucson Airport.

This Great Egret was there also, nice Bird for Arizona (actually, nice Bird anywhere, anytime.)

This female Pronghorn wondered what we were doing on the trip east into the bootheel. Not tons of people there.

Loggerhead Shrikes are signature Birds of the Southwest, we always hope they are doing well as they are having trouble nationally. This one was in the San Simon Valley to the east of the Peloncillo Mountains were the house is located.

The evening we arrived at the house up the canyon, I became overjoyed that as dusk fell we heard a bellicose “Killy Killy Killy” and watched as an American Kestrel sailed into the canyon and began flying around screaming as though declaring his Lordship over everything that moved. This must be the Bird that began showing up in the Canyon to roost three years ago! (see a former blog post). It must be still using the eaves of one of the buildings for roosting to keep safe from Owls and other evil creatures of the night. Kestrels have a long history in the bootheel and it’s not that good. My father-in-law kept records from a Raptor survey he used to do for the Hawk Mountain (PA) people and it showed a cliff-like Kestrel crash in about 1984. We are thrilled when we see them and once on this trip we saw this Bird’s mate with two young-of-the-year kiting over the canyon floor to the west of our place.

This is the view you get looking West after you’ve walked the mile or so to the pass, which is the spine of the Peloncillo Mountains. Those are the Chiricahua Mountains, which are higher, in the distance in Arizona. Two species of plants experienced horrendous dieoffs in the summer of 2025–that is June July and August, which were unprecedentedly hot and dry. Their loss is visible here in the brown-colored bushes and trees. The species were Pinon Pine, a key forest tree in the wetter higher areas and the Manzanita, a bush that is a relative of the Madrona Tree of the Northwest and like the Pinon Pine provides lots of food for wildlife.

We had a good time up at the house. We were lucky to have a three-day visit from Roger, an old friend who lives on a mesa not too far from Santa Fe–but not too close either. Roger is not the type to want to live too close to a city. That’s Delia.

Like all our visits to the canyon, every day we prayed for rain. On the last day a good rain put .7 or more on the ground. The drought is on everyone’s mind down there and for people like Delia and I it’s a very big deal as we love the Southwest the way it was, and we love the Birds that used to thrive there but for Ranchers it’s an even bigger deal by an order of magnitude because most ranchers are from families that go back to the homesteading days and it’s not only a living it’s a much bigger deal than even that. We live in hope that the traditional winter rains and perhaps especially the summer monsoon rains come back–a system today put a tiny bit of rain in the area and we are hoping for more.

This Golden Eagle, presumably a (smaller) male Bird, was hunting with his mate on the way down to the main road on the morning we headed back to Tucson.

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This was the welcome site on the “driveway” across our neighbor’s ranch (12 K acres). The rain the night before turned parts of the valley floor into a “playa.”

We saw this Prairie Falcon teetering on a wire when we got to the main road (Route 80) which would take us north to I-10 a highway loved by semi-truckers that gets you West to Tucson. But nobody says “Get your kicks on Highway 10.”

This is the most recent picture. We are fully back in Seattle now and stayed put while extensive flooding inundated much of Western Washington. Again this Christmas we had a sighting of Rachel the Pig–rather than Rudolph!–leading the sleigh, it was captured in a photo of the store at the Pike Place Market shown here. That’s Jennie laughing, but she’s not laughing at the heroic actions of Rachel who also collects money for charity 24/7. With all the mounting evidence favoring Rachel, such as this indisputable photo here, it’s concerning that Elvis Presley and Chris Isaak and others continue to only sing the praises of Rudolph.

This is our Raingarden that Delia is 100% responsible for. I did 0% of it, except take this picture of it being full this month.

Meanwhile, as I post this on Christmas, we are having an eerily normal Seattle winter day–Christmas 2025–with a normally cool rain rather than the warm rain of our recent flooding past or snow of the more distant past or the droughts that regularly appear lately. With a cool rain we can assume it’s adding to a snowpack in the mountains that actually seems like it may be approaching normal! Normal is a wonderful thing! Who ran on a “Return to Normalcy” ticket, was it Warren Harding, that most underrated President?

Normalcy is something we didn’t have much of in 2025. Let’s hope it begins to make a return in 2026.

–Ed Newbold contact me at ednewbold1@yahoo.com