Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Bird Camp

My wife, “A.,” works as a research assistant on a field biology project studying birds. These are dispatches from the camp where she works in an Arizona forest.

Snowy Morning at Bird Camp

In addition to her other tasks for the day, Amy dashed off this quick oil painting of the snow scene that awaited her this morning at Bird Camp.

Actually, it’s just a cell phone picture.

2008 05 23 Comments (0)

Bird Camp: Dispatch in Late May

I hold here the very latest text message from Amy — my assistant prints them up on onion-skin paper and runs into my office with them, shouting “this just in, sir!” — and it’s too good not to share.
Expecting foot of snow 2night
But that’s the way life goes when you throw off the trappings of [...]

2008 05 22 Comments (0)

Return of the Bird People

For background on Bird Camp — or if you find yourself confused by anything described below — see About Bird Camp.
A week ago Thursday, Amy and I got up and had breakfast like any other morning, then piled some bags into a GMC Suburban and a Ford F250 parked at the curb and set out [...]

2008 05 03 Comments (0)

Bird Camp 2008!

I just returned from driving down to Bird Camp with Amy and helping with some of the initial setup. I’ll work up my notes and post an account of the trip in the next day or so.
In the meantime, here is a little something I meant to cook up last year but never got [...]

2008 04 30 Comments (0)

Bird Camp Update: Next Stop, Missoula

Bird Camp is over. Everything is packed up and stowed, some of it in the new shed that A. built. Everyone is gone. The tents are down. Nothing left but trees and wind. And birds. A. didn’t get away until late Wednesday, and then only to Flagstaff. On Thursday, she and one coworker who is [...]

2007 07 27 Comments Off

Bird Camp Update

Sorry my bird-camp posts grew so sparse. I’ll do better next year, when I’m not preparing a rental property/to move.
But just a brief update, for those of who you interest yourselves in A.’s whereabouts. The season has finished out satisfactorily — “not perfect, but okay,” she says, which probably means that any normal human being [...]

2007 07 24 Comments Off

Notes on Flagstaff: an Eyewitness at Bird Camp

On my third morning in Flagstaff, a Friday, we eat breakfast across the tracks at Biff’s Bagels (named for somebody’s dead dog and now a repository of memorial photos of everyone else’s dead dog) then split up: I head back to the hotel to pack while A. drives one of the camp Suburbans to a [...]

2007 07 03 Comments (2)

Report on Flagstaff: Some Notes on the Town

1.
The Monte Vista Hotel opened in 1927 and trades on its retro image. There is an old-fashioned front desk with mail cubbyholes in the wall behind it. The decor is dark wood; the bar has a black and red color scheme. On the front desk, a brass plaque advertises “Ear plugs available upon request.” (Perhaps [...]

2007 07 03 Comments Off

Bird-related: birds disappearing

“Twenty common birds — including the northern bobwhite, the field sparrow and the boreal chickadee — have lost more than half their populations in the past 40 years, according to the society’s research… “Today you can’t find a bobwhite in Pennsylvania, and hearing a whippoorwill is a red letter day,” he said at an Audubon [...]

2007 06 15 Comments Off

Bird Camp Dispatch 6

I got a quick call from A. on Wednesday while I was at work. She was on the road, trying to locate an electronics shop that she’d found in the phone book to see if they could repair some damaged video cameras, and she called me to see if I could look up directions for [...]

2007 06 15 Comments Off