Nature Photographer and Music Producer
Species entries in the Oaks Bottom Field Guide — original photography and natural history from Portland, Oregon.
A small brown bird on the Oaks Bottom lookout deck — and one of the very few animals shown to choose its notes from the same overtone series that underlies human music. … Continue readingThe Hermit Thrush Sings in the Harmonic Series
Two American White Pelicans dropped into Oaks Bottom last week — a first for me, and for everyone I met on the trail that afternoon. … Continue readingWhite Pelicans at Oaks Bottom: A First for Everyone on the Trail
Go down to Oaks Bottom in October, after the summer crowds have stopped coming and the trail is mostly dog walkers, and look at what is still in flower. It
Continue readingOctober at Oaks Bottom: What One Native Aster Was Holding Up
Two afternoons in eighty-degree heat with a Godox AD200Pro and a 40-megapixel Fuji taught me that the shutter is not what freezes a bee. Here are the long-horned bees of Oaks Bottom, and the field guide all of this is building toward. … Continue readingMaking the Light: Flash Macro, and a Field Guide I Have Been Quietly Planning
Five eyes, two sets of genitalia, wings with no pigment in them, and a childhood spent underwater as an ambush predator. Fourteen photographs from the lake shore, and how to tell one from a dragonfly. … Continue readingThe Damselflies of Oaks Bottom
Four ounces of falcon. Two foveae in each eye, ultraviolet vision, and a habit of landing on twigs that move. Seven photographs of Oregon’s smallest raptor, and how to tell one from everything else. … Continue readingThe American Kestrel: Portland’s Smallest Falcon
The bird that fishes the Willamette by falling out of the sky feet-first — the hover, the dive, the miss, and the climb back out. Photographed from the Sellwood Bridge. … Continue readingThe Ospreys of the Willamette
Two completely different birds share the name hawk. Learn to tell a buteo from an accipiter and the whole city reorganizes itself. Red-tailed, red-shouldered and Cooper’s hawks, photographed in Oregon. … Continue readingThe Hawks of Portland
There are owls in Oaks Bottom. Most people who walk the loop never see one, and that is not bad luck — it is the entire design. An owl’s daytime
Three of them share the same water here, and most people only ever notice one. The great blue heron is unmissable — four feet of gray patience standing in the
There are two places I photograph bald eagles. One is a floodplain refuge inside the city of Portland, ten minutes from my house. The other is a beach on the
There is a moment, when something long and quick moves through the grass beside your foot, when the body decides before the mind does. Everybody has it. I have it.
When people picture a bee, they picture a honeybee — hive, queen, honey, the whole operation. But most of the bees actually working your garden aren’t honeybees at all. Oregon
Neskowin is a tiny village on the Oregon coast that has quietly turned itself into a bird sanctuary. The locals plant with intention — gardens full of flowers chosen to
Continue readingPlant the Flowers — Hummingbirds from Neskowin to Sellwood
Of all the birds that pass through Portland, none looks less real than the cedar waxwing. Its plumage is so sleek it seems airbrushed on. A fawn crest, a black
Continue readingThe Painted Cedar Waxwings: A Stunning Bird Profile
Not every face at the water’s edge has feathers. Down at Oaks Bottom, this raccoon came ambling along the bank and stopped to size me up — black mask, bright
This year the garden is talking back. Last spring I planted about five new rose bushes along my street — the small, sun-loving variety that you see everywhere in Portland
This morning at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge in Portland, I saw something I’d never seen before. A Western Skink, sunning itself on the stone steps along the trail. Brown body
Spring has arrived in Portland, and my backyard fig tree has become a stage for some of the Pacific Northwest’s most beautiful small birds. A suet feeder in the garden
Continue readingA Morning in the Cherry Blossoms —A variety of songbirds and woodpeckers
I spent my birthday exactly where I wanted to be—at Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge—surrounded by crisp fall air, dripping gold and copper leaves, and the calm of wetland life. It