Nature Photographer and Music Producer
Explore my adventures capturing Pacific Northwest wildlife through photography and videography. From stunning nature photos to music videos, interactive bird quizzes, and comprehensive field guides - join me on this journey through the natural world.
Three of my posts, three advertisements I never approved, and roughly $1,200 of advertising revenue that went to the company hosting them. Then I read Nextdoor’s own documentation and found out the ads had never stopped — I had just stopped seeing them. … Continue readingMy Photographs Are a Revenue Stream — For Nextdoor
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
I live on a city lot in Portland. The whole garden would fit in a lot of people’s living rooms — and it is the most effective stress relief I have ever found. What the science actually says, what brings the wildlife in, and why small does not mean insignificant. … Continue readingBuild Your Own Tiny Refuge
I am 54, on no medication, and earlier this summer I did a thousand pushups in a day. Not to impress you — so you know this comes from practice. Why health is the only thing you actually own, and what it genuinely costs. … Continue readingThe Only Wealth That Matters
Two to three hours a day in the woods with a camera. It turns out the Japanese have a name for it and decades of research behind it — plus a few mechanisms most articles leave out. … Continue readingForest Bathing: The Health Practice I Was Doing Without Knowing It
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
This is Prince — my collie, and my best friend growing up. 🐾 I’ve shared his portrait before, but I’ve never told the story that made him a legend in
He turned up while I was in the middle of remodeling downstairs — a lean, friendly cat with no collar, hungry and thirsty and clearly a long way from wherever
Every neighborhood has its cast of regulars — and not all of them are people. Ours comes with a whole roster of cats, each one working its own territory on
Every block has a lucky cat. Ours is Bodhi — my neighbor’s beloved companion, and very likely the most fortunate animal for a mile in any direction. By my count
Between the birds, a bit of drifting color. Swallowtails are the big kites of the butterfly world — broad-winged, unhurried, and impossible to ignore when one comes tumbling through on
Some days Oaks Bottom hands you everything at once. Today was one of those — a flawless 75 degrees, the kind of blue overhead that makes you slow right down,
You would think a four-foot bird would be impossible to miss. You would be wrong. This Great Blue Heron was standing more or less in the open, and I nearly
Some birds you chase for the drama. This one I chased for the light. The Lesser Goldfinch is the smallest finch in North America — a tiny bird, hardly bigger
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
After a week of kingfishers and herons down at the water, Sellwood Park handed me something with a very different job description. A predator. I had an encounter with a
Oaks Bottom is a pond full of fishers — but a few of them are masters, and they couldn’t go about it more differently. One is all explosive speed; another,
Continue readingThe Fishers of Oaks Bottom — Part One: The Kingfisher & the Heron
A few scenes from the garden this season — a rose letting go, roses planted for strangers, and lilies caught in the last good light. Different flowers, one quiet idea:
Some mornings the garden fills up with small, fast birds working the feeder. None of them hold still for long — which is half the fun of trying to photograph
Continue readingThe Garden’s Smaller Guests — Bushtit, Chickadees, and a Nuthatch
Spring is the season of new life. You can see it everywhere, if you slow down — in the hardhack (Spiraea douglasii) bursting open along the water, pink and soft
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