The most beautiful insect I’ve ever seen in person. It looked like a piece of enameled jewelry.

This nest had two chicks in it; when we took them out to band them, we found two unhatched eggs. The lighter one is a junco egg; the dark one is a cowbird egg. These juncos were lucky that the cowbird egg didn’t hatch!

One common bush at our field sites had lots of these fruit-looking things. If you cut them open…

…they looked very strange. Eventually we figured out that these are galls that a certain insect causes the bush to make; the tiny insect larva then lives in the white stuff in the center of the gall.

BAIN has a single white feather under his eye.

We called this The Worst Nest Ever. The female had built it under a single, fairly small fallen branch for cover; one gust of wind could have removed it. In the end the nest was depredated – you can see a broken eggshell off to the left in this photo – but the branch stayed put.

This nest was built in a well-protected spot, but it came to a worse end. Not only were the chicks eaten, but the large number of adult feathers left in the nest suggests that the mother was eaten too. We think the predator was an American Marten.

A storm coming in.

This damselfly has had eggs laid on it (the orange things)!
EDIT: Actually these orange things are not eggs but water mites. They feed on the damselfly and use it for transportation; eventually they drop off.

Nestlings in a hat, waiting to be banded.

A (pregnant, surely?) cow standing in one of our field sites. We thought they were funny until we saw what they did to the habitat and how they trampled nests.

My field assistants looking for the remains of the nest that some enterprising people had decided to drop chopped-down trees on top of. They didn’t even haul away the logs afterwards. The chicks were killed but the mother escaped, and she renested and fledged two chicks.

The male Western Tanager we accidentally caught. So beautiful.

A shrike had taken advantage of the spikes on some barbed wire to hang up his food. Based on the tail, this was a squirrel.

This, about a meter further along the barbed wire, was probably another squirrel.

One evening we came back to camp to find everything we’d left on the table torn and pecked. Initially we blamed Stellar’s Jays, but eventually we settled on ravens as our prime suspects.

Fledgling ERSA, twisting her head around to keep an eye on me. When I put her back where I found her after banding, she ran out of the brush and into the middle of the road. I retrieved her and then we all spent lunch watching the road to make sure she wouldn’t try that again.