I’m grateful that it is only on the third day that Paul tells me that the Las Piedras River, where we have been boating, floating and swimming, my clothes perpetually wet from the afternoon plunges, is swimming with Piranhas. I knew about the Caiman, Spectacled and Yellow, that I’ve seen lounging on the banks, and scoot off whenever the boat comes near. I’ve tamed my response to snakes—an embarrassing nerve-jangling recoil—by understanding that every snake is more afraid of me than I am of it. But Piranhas, that’s news. I laugh and say: cool.
Read MoreI wasn’t ready for the mass of screaming gulls, or for the piles of Horseshoe Crabs along the shoreline, the males riding tight to the females, tails spiked toward the overcast sky. With each wave, another batch of horseshoe crabs washed up on Reed's Beach near Cape May, NJ, and what ensued was a wave of screams and hollers, whistles and hoots, a frenzy of the Laughing Gulls and Herring Gulls, and those remarkable little shorebirds, the Red Knots, fresh in from Tierra del Fuego.
Cape May is always good birding. On my few visits there, I’ve always left a bit dazzled by the sights. Once was a flock of hundreds of Sanderlings swooping the shore, landing, then circling out to the ocean in a choreographed movement that took my breath. Now here I had stumbled onto one of the great events of migration, witness to more feeding gulls and shorebirds than I had ever seen on one slim beach.
Read MoreI love the word malheur, the way my neighbor in France sighs over the weather or a chicken that is ill: Quel Malheur. It’s impossible to translate the woe of the world, the adversity of life woven into those two words. Quel Malheur. But the Malheur in the news these days is the 187,000 acre Refuge in Eastern Oregon where a group of armed men are staked out, and not planning to leave.
In three days, I will slide into my Subaru wagon, loaded with skis and snowshoes, and head west, for Oregon. I’ve chosen a northerly route, through North Dakota and Montana, two states I have never visited. I’ll stop along the way, in search of northerly birds, hoping for such treats as a Great Gray Owl, but also less glamorous but still wondrous species for this Eastern girl, like Gray-crowned Rosy finch, or Evening Grosbeaks.
Read MoreUcross, Wyoming, population 25, is situated just east of the Bighorn Mountains, on the western edge of the Powder River Basin. It’s 20,000 acres of high desert sagebrush, rubbing up against wetlands, grasslands, and riparian habitat where the Clear and Piney Creeks run. It’s ranchland, dotted with cows and emptiness, studded with boulders tossed from space; there are pockets of petrified wood and lots of cool birds. And the news this fall is that all of this land is now designated an IBA— Important Bird Area—a designation made after careful review by the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy. 20,000 acres of protected land where birds can breed or migrate through unmolested, is not much in the grand scheme of this planet. But for a few key species—the Greater Sage Grouse and the Long-billed Curlew —these 20,000 acres is a big difference, perhaps the difference of survival.
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