Arizona

Magic Canyon

Among the many wonders to be found in southeastern Arizona is Aravaipa Canyon.   The heart of this isolated canyon shadows Aravaipa Creek, with about 12 miles of it being included in the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness.  It’s a lush canyon, with permanent water, and home to a huge variety of wildlife.   I’ve visited and written about […]

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Timings and transitions

  On our recording trip this last spring, Lang Elliott and I stopped by a beautiful area of Sonoran Desert, east of Roosevelt Lake, known as Cherry Creek.  I’d never heard of it before, but was instantly struck by its rugged beauty.  Cherry Creek, and nearby Coon Creek, are lovely drainages with rich riparian areas

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Late winter soundscape in the Sonoran Desert

As a follow-up to my last post about the tardiness of migration this last spring, I wanted to use our trip to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument as an example.  Lang Elliott and I recorded recorded here in late March of 2017.  The expected compliment of birds was there, behaving as I’d come to expect

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Sunrise on the lower Colorado River, California

Best laid plans

I recently returned from a 7-week sound recording expedition to the southwest U.S.  From Carson City, to southern California, southern Arizona, southern Texas, western New Mexico, central and southern Arizona, a quick trip to Albuquerque to see friends, back to Arizona, and finally home through Utah and central Nevada.  Almost 7,500 miles, and almost all

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Retrospective

Well, it’s been quite a while since I posted here, as I’ve been recovering from knee replacement surgery.  Recovery has been quite the ordeal, with hours and hours of physical therapy every day.  But the strength and flexibility is coming back, just in time, as the trees and shrubs are starting to bud, the spring

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Starry skies and fireflies

I was perusing the internet recently (a bad habit), when I ran across something someone posted about fireflies.  I don’t remember the gist of the article, but it did remind me of a magical experience I had with fireflies last summer in the mountains of eastern Arizona. I was actually there to try to record

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Before the fire

It’s been a horrible year for fires out west. I’ve spent much of the summer dodging smoke and trying to find areas to record that are not on fire.   Southeastern Arizona is a naturally fire-prone area, with much of the flora and fauna adapted to wildfires from dry lightning storms at the start of  the

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Night sounds in a desert canyon

Like many nature recordists, I’m a bit obsessed with recording the spring dawn chorus.  It’s dynamic variety, changing by the minute, the day, the season, the habitat, is like candy for the ears.  However, I’m almost as fascinated by the night sounds – the singing insects and amphibians, the owls, the night jars, and the

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Chasing the dawn chorus

The dawn chorus is a wonderful, natural phenomenon in which many birds do most of their singing at or before the first light of day.  It is most obvious during the spring, as birds set up territories and go about attracting mates.  In southern Arizona, the resident birds begin singing in February, and many are

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El Lobo, part 3: surrounded by ghosts

In June of this year, I headed back to lobo (Mexican wolf) country in northern Arizona.  I drove up to a remote camping area near Escudilla Mountain, arriving on a cloudy and windy  afternoon.  On the way up to the camp site, I passed several elk cows with small calves at their heels.  I set up

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Burned forest in the Chiricahua Mtns.

Chiricahuas Revisited

The Chiricahua Mountains are one of the largest of the “Sky Island” ranges that separate the Sierra Madre of Mexico from the Rocky Mountains of the US and Canada.  It is a rich, convoluted mountain range, and like most of the adjacent ranges, high in plant and animal diversity.  These ranges are subject to frequent wildfires, and

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Milky way

Chasing night sounds

There are a lot of interesting sounds that are seldom heard except at night.  Not just bats and owls, but also a variety of insects: crickets, bush crickets, and beetles, to name a few.  The insects like warm nights, and so that’s also when you have more insect predators, like the bats. It’s been really

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