wildlife

February 1, 2026January 31, 2026

Backyard Habitat

Winter has settled in around us. At the moment, the snow has melted, replaced with a bitter cold and freezing fog shrouds the mornings.

The snow will eventually fall, as will the cold snap break. It is full on winter in Central Oregon.

As I look up from the keyboard to watch morning replace dawn, there is a new addition to the courtyard . . . just beyond the office window.

Between an aspen tree and the house is a bird feeding station. More to the point, an 8-foot metal pole twisted into the ground and adorned with various means of offering food to the local wildlife.

Up to this winter, we have not been feeding birds at this house. At previous dwellings, we had multiple feeding stations. What changed?

In time we took note of our surroundings and started to look more closely at the space around our small home.

This past summer we made additions to the pergola over a southside patio. This turned in to more time spent sitting outside.

Then this winter we started opening the window blinds in our office space. A trio of thirty foot evergreens screen a small courtyard from the alleyway.

An offset of the garage wall from the main house makes up the other two sides of a semi-private space. There is a 20-foot aspen sitting about six feet away from our office window.

This grove of trees offers resting perches and homes to a variety of small song birds. They were joined this fall by a pair of Scrub Jays, who added to the frenetic display.

As we spent more time looking outside, we noticed a couple of large gray squirrels carting whole shelled peanuts from a neighbor’s feeding station.

Hour after hour they scurried across our yard, over the road, and into the wooded lot to the east of us. It just seemed like a good time for us to get in on the action.

Maybe it’s an old age thing . . . but watching little balls of feathers dart from branch to ground and back is relaxing.

Plus , we’re keeping them fed when food sources are scarce. and temperatures dip. It feels great to help our backyard neighbors.

December 21, 2025December 20, 2025

Flora and Fauna

As a final post to our Look Back at 2025, it seems appropriate to end with a favorite subject . . . wildlife.

Every destination, regardless of the season, has interesting sights. Our attention usually focuses on the local inhabitants and their environment.

Whether we came for that purpose or not.

The drive to Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge is a destination specifically to bird watch.

But other places we stop, say to collect a few rocks or catch a fish, present as much or more variety to observe and photograph.

Hours have been spent sitting at river’s edge, camera trained on a clump of reeds offering protection to a family of Mergansers.

We watched a fledgling Osprey hold off a gang of Magpies and attempted to track the flights of butterflies.

With binocs and telephoto lens trained on a raptor we watched it devour a recent catch.

We noticed that the people parked two sites down hadn’t even looked up into the tree branches.

It’s important to take time and look around, to see what you’ve missed. An advantage to this slower pace is nature often comes to you.

A lunch on the rivers’ edge is filled with all manner of flora and fauna. Thankfully we have the time to watch it unfold.

Camera gear makes sharing experiences, as well as getting a better look, possible.

BlackDogHair blog serves as a journal on how we spent the week. A month of looking back at those posts reminded us how lucky we’ve been for the opportunity.

November 21, 2019January 6, 2020

Sunriver Nature Center

One sunny afternoon last week we headed over to the Nature Center at Sunriver Resort.

The idea was to check on the new trumpeter swan cygnets and maybe get a glimpse of the river otters JQ spied earlier this month.

The swans were in sight, however no river otters. Instead we were treated to a close up view of a Great Horned Owl, Joe.

He was hit by a car and is blind in one eye, thus he’s become a permanent resident of the nature center’s rehab and education facility.

March 10, 2019December 16, 2019

Trip to the Museum

This late winter dump of snow put a stop to regular day trips. However, the La Pine Library has passes to local attractions so you don’t have to pay the entrance fee…cool.

Started in the early 80’s, the High Desert Museum serves as an educational center to “… explore the historic and contemporary relationship between people and landscape.”

The permanent exhibits are fine (but ‘been there, done that). So, we take a stroll by the Hollen Atrium to see the porcupine and bobcat. Then we head into the Desertarium, where the desert tortoise and burrowing owls reside. Depending on the time of day, there are also wildlife demonstrations, though we seem to keep missing the river otter feeding. That’s a priority for our next visit.

Once we’ve checked in on the critters, we can spend some time with the “changing exhibit.” This week they just installed ‘The Beauty of Wild Things: Charcoal drawings by April Coppini.” Coppini is a Portland based artist that does exceptional gestural charcoal on paper. We really like the bumble bee series.

It’s called a museum, but they have more than a dozen sites along a meandering system of trails that take you into the environment. The Raptors presentation, Otter exhibit and Birds of Prey center are all really interesting, even encased in a layer of snow.