One of my favorite places to visit and record in northern Nevada is Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, near Fallon. It’s a collection of ponds, ditches, and marshes, where the Carson and a portion of the Truckee Rivers end. It is such a critical oasis in the arid Great Basin that it’s part of the Western […]
Seasons of Stillwater revisited Read More »
This year I decided to expand the acoustic monitoring that I’ve been conducting at the River Fork Ranch in northern Nevada. The Nature Conservancy has been supported of my efforts by graciously providing access to preserves, so I decided to try to monitor at other TNC preserves. In April of this year, I headed south
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
I recently returned from an 11-day road trip through central and southern Oregon. I traveled from Steen’s Mountain in the east, across to the central Cascades, to the coast and then south until I ran out of Oregon, back to the Cascades in southern Oregon, and home via Mts. Shasta and Lassen. It was more
Strange sounds in the night Read More »
This summer has been unbelievable in the amount of smoke, even in areas distant from the wildfires in California, Nevada, and the Pacific Northwest. In northern Nevada, rather than the rare smoky day, a day better than “moderate” air quality was something to celebrate. During much of July and August, the air quality never got
Escaping the smoke Read More »
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
I made my annual summer migration from southeastern Arizona to northern Nevada a few weeks ago, stopping to record along the way. My first stop was in the Blue Range of east-central Arizona, a land of conifers and beautiful grassy meadows. Much of this area was impacted by the 2011 Wallow Fire, and the hillsides
