Posted from Seattle Sept. 21, 2011 I went down Monday with my friend Brian to the Tacoma tide flats. It always surprises me how big and close Mt. Rainier is from Tacoma since I'm used to the distant view Seattle gets. We were looking for this Asian vagrant Gull,...
Posted Sept. 18, 2011 from Seattle The Tanagers are a relentlessly colorful group of birds that emanate from the neotropics. The only one that makes it up to the Mountain West and Northwest is the famed Western Tanager. Sometimes you'll see a pale young male and say,...
Sept. 17, 2011 from Seattle, WA This is what the Deception Pass painting is looking like now. I'm no longer captivated by this painting and it will go into a sales-testing pattern rather than be put on the offset-litho publication schedule. I've also been working on...
Posted September 6, 2011 from Seattle WA. Bird expert Andy Stepniewski has written to say yesterday's Nisqually Plover was an American Golden-Plover rather than a Pacific Golden-Plover. Here are the points he kindly made to help us with our Plover ID: 1-the number of primaries extending beyond the tertials is...
Posted Labor Day Sept 5, 2011 from Seattle WA. Delia and I . went down early to the Nisqually to look for Baird's Sandpipers that had been reported from there and dipped on those but found this Pacific Golden-Plover. This shot was taken practically from the...
Posted Sept. 4 from Seattle, WA. After a hatchet-job by Mara Liason on the same subject, Scott Simon interviewed Ron Paul about his courageous position that FEMA should be dismissed. The show is here: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=140163743&m=140163952 Paul eloquently defended his position and made the point that environmentalists have been...
Posted September 2, 2011 from Seattle. Famed NOAA Climate scientist Jim Hanson says that if we approve the Keystone Pipeline—The Canadian pipeline that would bisect the country from North to South and deliver Canadian crude oil from Alberta’s tar-sands to Texas-- it’s “game over” for...
Posted August 21, 2011 from Seattle. It's almost a decade too late to influence the debate when it mattered and help forestall the tragedy of the ethanol mandate, but Scientific American has admirably come out with an article critical of biofuels in its August 2011...
Posted August 20, 2011 from Seattle, WA. Before I dropped everything to work on the 7th and last Washington State Birding Trail Map, I was wroking on this Osprey at Deception Pass painting. Having given it a break gave me fresh eyes, and I feel like...
posted August 11, 2011 The painting that will be on the cover of the 7th and last Birding Trail Map, featuring two Eagles on a snag at Cape Flattery, doesn't exist. Well, it sort of does. Ed Newbold began an Eagle/Flattery painting in the middle oughts and...
posted August 1, 2011 from Seattle, WA. We just got back from the Bootheel of New Mexico, where my parents-in-law live. There were 3 or 4 hundred Hummingbirds holed up at the Ranch apparently waiting for a few flowers to bloom in the outback, including this Broad-billed Hummingbird. And this...
June 20, 2011 from Seattle. Updated August 10, 2011 Below is the beginning, if it works, of the upper right quadrant of the seventh and last Birding Trail Maps of Washington State. This map will cover the trough of Western Washington from Pierce and Kitsap Counties...
Posted June 26, 2011 from Seattle, WA. Lake Sammamish State Park was teeming with birds and reproductive activity today, although Delia and I dipped on both our target birds. (an American Redstart has been reported there and Red-eyed Vireos are always likely, plus we missed Green...
posted June 24, 2011; Seattle, WA It's good to see the painting represented on a computer screen--it really helps identify the flaws. I think I need a lot more definition in the foliage of the Firs marching up the side of the cliff. I still feel...
Posted June 22, 2011. When a Killdeer doesn’t want you to know where the nest is, it creates a distraction display and determinedly leads you somewhere—anywhere--else. The Killdeer shown below was getting excited in the early stages of a distraction display at Spencer Island in Everett,WA last...
The Seattle Times is ambling in the right direction with its June 20 editorial “End Ethanol Support,” which commended Senators including both WA Senators Cantwell and Murray for a largely symbolic vote to end the $6 billion subsidy for ethanol and the tariff against imported...
Hi all, Update June 19, 2011; posted June 13, 2011 from Seattle, WA. I'm tired of finishing stuff. (The last thing I finished was Common Loon, which is up in the store under 11 x 14s and 8 x 10s.) It's time to start a slew of...
Posted June 12, 2011 from Seattle, WA In a feature story by Marilyn Geewax, NPR's Morning Edition again covered the rising-price-of-food story while barely mentioning ethanol. Geewax pegged the story on the weird weather that has diminished prospects for the US crop this year, quoting USDA economist...
Posted June 1: updated June 9, 2011 [caption id="attachment_854" align="alignleft" width="400"] Western Tanager, photo by Ed Newbold. Western Tanager is one of many North American birds that are to some degree dependent on shade coffee plantations.[/caption] Saving Birds like this has now become almost as easy as shooting...
Posted May 25, 2011 updated May 26 with Lazuli Bunting, et al sightings It’s a paradox of photography and Photoshop software that a gloomy spring can result in some very bright shots. Delia and I have been birding around Washington state lately and we’ve had to retreat at...
May 8, 2011 Weather in Western Washington has been abnormally cold, windy and rainy and that has bottled up the bird migration. The result to this casual observer seems to be that birds are seemingly trying to decide when to move on an almost individual basis. Our...
May 7, 2011 In a story covering the release of a study linking higher food prices with global climate change, NPR failed to add any reference to that other huge vector force driving food prices up: biofuel mandates in the US and Europe. A list of...