Happy Birthday, Bill Thompson!

Three words: fun, music, love. Arrange them any way you wish, but they still sum up Bill Thompson III. Usually, they overlap.

Everything is more fun with some BT3 added.He can make little girls laugh like nobody's business. Washington County Fair, Marietta, Ohio

He enjoys helping others see more birds and have more fun.

Whipple, Ohio, with a particularly porcine Chet Baker


The Pied Piper of Birding: Bill brought a whole classroom along on the three-year journey to publishing his new book, The Young Birder's Guide to Eastern North America.

Perhaps you can pick out a beaming, proud Phoebe in the upper right corner

Comparatively few get to see Bill's musical side, but he plays every Sunday, and as often as he can with our band, The Swinging Orangutangs. Here he is with his dad, Bill Thompson Jr., an amazing jazz pianist.

Parkersburg, West Virginia

With the Swinging Orangutangs:
and shredding it up on Kremey Delight.
Photography has got him in its spell, whether he's shooting a quirky street sign or Giant Thing in Nebraska


or blasting harmlessly away at sandhill cranes in New Mexico.


He is a GREAT slow dancer. Just ask Alvaro.

Snowbird, Utah
What happens at Snowbird stays at Snowbird, unless it finds its way onto a blog somewhere...

And as a daddy, he does what needs to be done.
Up the gangplank with a drowsy child. Hog Island, Maine

Magdalena, New Mexico

I feel lucky to be along for the ride. Happy birthday and Godspeed on your travels, Bill Thompson III. We love you more than you can know.

Baker Goes Airborne

Keep-away is the staple of the terrier games in this house. When a Boston terrier focuses on an object of desire, be it biscuit, toy, or squirrel, there is not much that will keep him from his goal. Bill of the Birds enjoys at least one daily game of Keep-away with Chet Baker, usually right before bedtime.Give me that cat toy.
CrazyFace is when Baker's tongue sticks out and his eyes go all googly.
All right. It's on. BOTB is in real danger of getting a faceful of Boston here.
He's saying Meowmeowmeowmeowmeow.
Interlude, while Bill hides the kitty. Baker waits, eyes glowing.
You do not want to be the object of a Boston terrier's most intense focus. Look at those pursed lips.
Found it!
Phoebe joins in the laughter.
Baker is grunting rhythmically, toenails sliding on the slick floor, as he tries to pull the kitty out of Bill's grip. Unh unh unh unh unh unh... As Phoebe would say, "That's just wrong."
In every photo session there's one that you don't dare hope to get.

29th Airborne Turd-tail Assault. Here comes the faceful of terrier.
The enemy, vanquished.

Babies, Bill, Baker

At the brand-new birding festival in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia at the end of September, Bill and I hosted a birding clinic for kids. It was a hoot! It was raining lightly, but there were gobs and gobs of bluebirds and cedar waxwings and woodpeckers, and we just put the spotting scope on them and handed out binoculars and had a ball hearing the gasps and exclamations of kids getting their first good look at a bluebird or a flicker. Great Swarovski optics help. Yes, that was a product placement, but one for which I receive no compensation. I'm just sayin'.

Look at the hands on this little guy. His mom is telling him not to touch the scope, and he's doing his best. Ohhhhh....baby hands, curled up, does that do as much for you as it does for me?

Barely more than a baby, he was so intrigued by what everyone else was seeing (bluebirds) through Bill of the Birds' scope that he insisted on having a look for himself. I'm not sure he got much satisfaction, but at least he got to be a big kid for awhile. Swarovski binocs, no less, dimpled knuckles. OK. I am a baby freak.
Sooo sweet. Agggh. He brought me to my knees. Gimme one of those. Of course, I was flashing back heavily to Liam's baby days when the only name he answered to was Po Po. I have a weakness for little blonde boys. I am the kind of person who chooses the grocery line that has a baby in it, so I can mess with the baby, talking to it, trying to get a smile; talking to the mom, just digging that baby. I was always a little afraid of them until I had my own. Now I can't get enough of them. I can feel Nature preparing me for the next life passage--watching my own "red-headed, limber elf" grow up. And someday have her own. Who I will walk off with for hours at a time, rocking side to side.

I was talking about Bill before I got onto babies. I miss him. Thanks to our mutual travel schedules, we'll see each other for parts of only five days in five weeks. Days which will be spent packing and unpacking. He returned from a week away in Panama on Monday, flying into Columbus, while I left for a week away on Monday, flying out of Akron. We did not meet in the middle. Not even a shared burger at Max and Erma's. Glamorous as all get out, traveling is.

So I'm feeling like looking at pictures of my absent mate. Holding a baby, so much the better. Sigh...

Bill is very generous in helping others see birds. He's famous for it at festivals nationwide.

He even helps little brindle people see birds.
Oh, yes, Daddeh. Now I see the vulture. Thank yew.

Chet Baker, that is a bluebird.

It looked bigger in the binoculars. Well. Do you have any new toys for me?

All right. That's enough sweetness and light. If you read the mountaintop removal posts here
and here, and they moved you, I implore you to read this editorial in the New York Times. It's short. One page. Read it.

In short, because both Barack Obama and John McCain have expressed opposition to mountaintop removal mining, the Bush Administration is rushing to remove the last environmental regulation remaining that slows permit applications for mountaintop removal mining, leaving more miles of Appalachian streams open to being buried in valley fill operations.

Somebody explain to me why coal companies should be exempt from environmental impact regulations. Because they completely destroy the environment, so there's nothing left to impact? Oh, I get it.

Isn't 1,200 miles of streams buried too much already? The huge coal companies, with the regulation re-writes by Bush administration lawyers, are tearing our mountains down around us, burying and poisoning our rivers and streams, burying and poisoning the people of Appalachia. Please, please read it, and then go here to take speedy action. You'll go to a page on ilovemountains.org that will help you both to find your Federal representative and virtually instantly email your opposition to this race to destroy Appalachia before a more enlightened administration is able to take hold. It is a nation of termites, getting that coal now, getting it fast, leaving a wasteland behind.

If you like this blog, you gotta pay for it somehow. Do it. Thanks, Patty, for the heads up on this fresh, sneaky and devastating assault on our mountains, our streams, our wildlife and our people.

Looking for Bill of the Birds?

Blogger rejects any and all of my dear husband's attempts to post this past week. It's a known problem with anyone who posts via FTP; i.e., anyone who's not hosted at Blogspot. And it must be a big'un. In desperation, he's changed his address, but he can't even post THAT on his poor benighted becalmed befuddled blog. So please, go find Bill of the Birds here:

http://billofthebirds.blogspot.com

Do leave a comment so he knows you've found him. He'll be at the above URL until further notice. Chet Baker thanks you, I thank you, and BOTB thanks you.

A Rare Blue

If you're going to brag on your big sweetie, Valentine's Day is as good a day as any. I owe Bill of the Birds a life morph. For those of you who aren't avid birders, and who don't split lifelisting hairs, a life morph is a color phase of a species that you've never seen before. The flocks of snow and Ross' geese at Bosque del Apache NWR are fairly ubiquitous, and their members can number in the tens of thousands. The vast majority of those tens of thousands are white-morph birds. Big white goose=Snow goose. Little white goose=Ross' goose. Most people don't bother to comb through them. Bill did. And he found a bird that set the refuge afire: a blue morph Ross' goose.

Ross' geese are like shrinky-dink snow geese. Much smaller, more compact, much cuter, actually, with pushed-in faces and stubby pink and blue bills. Both snow and Ross' geese come in a blue morph, which can breed with the white morphs and are in every way still snow or Ross' geese, except for their plumage color. It's like red or gray morph screech owls--just a different color of the same species, nothing more.

Blue morph snow geese are not as common as white morph, but they're tolerably common and easy to find. Here's one.This blue goose's underwing is a map of color-coded feathers. Look at those gorgeous underwing coverts, especially the ovoid pad of axillars, which are long, flexible, gossamer- textured feathers in the wingpit, that serve to contour the bird in flight, so wind doesn't eddy in the angle between wing and body. Lovely!

And here's a blue goose flying with a snow goose, perhaps its mate or its parent.Blue morph Ross' geese are another thing altogether. Very, very rare.

Here it is: the hopelessly sharp and classy little blue-morph Ross' goose that Bill found, rarest of the rare. Sorry it's so blurry, but it was a long, long way off. That's a white-morph Ross' in the foreground.
Here's another shot, in which you can see a great big white-morph snow goose in the upper left, and a white-morph Ross' next to the blue Ross'. I was stunned by the beauty of the rare blue bird, really more black than blue, with its zippy black-drawn tertials, its perfect white head, and clean markings. Thanks, Bill of The Birds.
That about does it for the New Mexico posts. Sorry I'm jumping around so much lately, taking old preserves off the pantry shelf. We're getting ready for two trips back-to-back and our lives are like a whirling wind tunnel leading to those departures. Imagine going from the humid lowlands of Guatemala to the frigid, windswept plains of Nebraska in March without even getting to come home to change out your suitcase. That's what happens when you book a festival two years in advance. Another life lesson for the Chimp.