Here are a few of my recent and favorite published articles and essays!
Nestled on my porch, a cup of coffee in one hand and binoculars in the other, I spent the spring watching my neighbors. I’ve been watching them for almost 20 years, and I can’t get enough of the drama, but this season’s storyline was hitting me harder than in years past.
I bought my house in 2004, a 1925 Craftsman-style surrounded by century-old Aleppo pines and Italian cypress in Banning, California — a pass-through city between Los Angeles and Palm Springs. The house was a wreck. I was in my early 30s and almost as much of a wreck.
The addition of California native plants invites a magical micro ecosystem into your garden.
Walking through my garden of desert globemallow, sunflower bush, sage, and penstemon this spring, I noticed the incredible number of pollinators buzzing around the blooms. This was the first year that most of my plants were mature, and while I had seen butterflies and honeybees in past years, this was a new cast of insects. Peering into the mallow flowers, I caught flashes of metallic greens and much smaller bees. I realized if I wanted a closer look, I was going to need photographs.
Hearing the familiar “squee” call of a juvenile Cooper’s hawk in my backyard, I looked up and then laughed. Four young hawks were sitting in the limbs of a snag, observing and seemingly commenting on my activities. I knew all four of these hawks; I had raised them from chicks who had fallen from their nests. I fed them, treated them for illnesses and released them. They were currently exploring and learning to hunt while still benefiting from a feeding station in my backyard.
Blue colors in nature are left up to interpretation by the person observing, just like in literature
I’ve been thinking a lot about refraction lately and how in nature and writing, reality is in the eye of the beholder. Spend any length of time observing nature and it will spin a story for you, but how you read it is up to you. Is it a triumph that the Cooper’s hawk is returning to its nest with a house finch for its voracious chicks? Or is it a tragedy that the fragile finch chicks have one less parent to feed them? Nature loves this communion between the observer and reality so much that it is frequent and layered.
Anthony Metcalf has fond memories of visiting Mystic Lake with his father when he was a boy.
He remembers strange smoking trash fires at the shoreline and the muddy mysteries of the wetlands. As a teenager, he returned to embrace the lake’s solitude and peace. It wasn’t until after receiving his Ph.D. and becoming a biology professor at Cal State San Bernardino that a love for ecology and birding brought him back.
On Nov. 2, I trapped a juvenile red-tailed hawk and began the process of training. He will likely be returned to the wild after a year or two of guaranteed food, health benefits, and company housing, but he became my partner for the falconry season.
As a falconer, I have a hunting license along with my falconry license and adhere to hunting seasons just like any other hunter. However, my red-tailed hawk, “Ronnie James Dio,” already knew how to hunt rabbits, regulations or not. By the end of December, we had become fast friends, and I was able to set him loose to fly my favorite open spaces while I labored to make a rabbit appear for him. Falconry is my passion, and I think, or at least hope, it is what has kept me a decent human being.