I’ve chosen to study and photograph Hummingbirds for the past nine years, following my first exposure to them in 2006.
To learn more about Dan Weisz go to aspect. I have images on permanent display at Agua Caliente Park’s Ranch House and at the Paton Center for Hummingbirds in Patagonia. Tucson Audubon Society has used my work and images in their web blog, in the Vermilion Flycatcher newsletter and for various communications including print, e-mail newsletters and social networks. The Sierra Club’s “Daily Ray of Hope” has featured numerous images of mine on their e-newsletter and social networks.
ADOBE BRIDGE CLUB TUCSON FREE
I took up photography and I now volunteer at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum with their renowned Raptor Free Flight program, both as a narrator and as a bird handler. After a career in Public Education, I retired and am able to spend more time outdoors. I love Tucson for its rich diversity of people, cultures, and traditions. To me, Tucson has always been the sounds of doves waking me in the morning, the smell of a summer rain, the mountains and desert, the beauty of our sunsets and the equally mesmerizing sight of our fleeting sunrises. I remember playing with lizards and ants in the yard and building forts made of tumbleweeds. The male Broad-billed has a bright red/orange beak, a dark green body and a brilliant blue neck that takes one’s breath away.” I am a native Tucsonan who grew up in a house west of Alvernon, near Speedway when Speedway was unpaved east of Country Club. Birding hasn’t become an obsession, except for a particular Russett-crowned Motmot in Mexico, but a comfortable companion.Īnd by the way, I still have those 1960s 7×35 binoculars.Ĭommonly in the summer. Both as part of my job and just for fun, I have been fortunate over the years to bird some amazing places here in the states and abroad. So, yes, I did graduate from birdwatcher to birder. I “graduated” to better glasses – 8x42s – and began to bird “by ear.” I am sure many of us recognize more bird sounds than we might think – the chug-chug-chug of a car engine turning over (Cactus Wren), chi-ca-go-go (Gambel’s Quail), yip-yip-yip (Gila Woodpecker) or the sound of summer, who-cooks-for-you (White-winged Dove). Every new bird “learned” was a new friend, someone to get to know – what did they eat, where did they hang out, what distinguished them from a similar species. The more frustrating birding got, the more rewarding it became. Lynn and I began scheduling day trips to places like Madera Canyon and the San Pedro River. I bought a pair of bins – binoculars to the uninitiated – Bushnell 7x25s that were barely adequate, but helped get me closer to the action.
I learned the birders’ vernacular – LBJs are “little brown jobs,” meaning impossible look-alike sparrows and Butter Butts are Yellow-rumped Warblers – and that by convention, bird names are ALWAYS capitalized. How a Cactus Wren cocked its head when eyeing a potential meal the nervous wing flicking of Ruby-crowned Kinglets the territorial displays of tiny Costa’s Hummingbirds it was about observation and finding meaning in behavior. I am sure it is because of the way Lynn taught me to look at them, not as items on a checklist, but as fascinating individuals busy going about their lives. Through our collaboration and friendship, I discovered something – I really liked watching birds. In prepping for my first docent program, I turned to Lynn for help with the class on birds and worked with her to establish our first docent-guided birding tours that same year. At the time, she was working on a new field guide to North American birds with her then husband, Kenn Kaufman. In 1991 I took over the Education Department and got to know a docent named Lynn Hassler. As a budding anti-establishment intellectual, this all seemed most absurd.Īnd then one day about 20 years later, I took a job at a little place in NW Tucson called Tohono Chul Park. Meaning they would actively seek out a particular bird and travel to distant lands to achieve this goal rather than just observing whatever came their way. Our Tucson neighbors were definitely birders, as opposed to birdwatchers. We had a pair of binoculars, bought for my Dad one Father’s Day for a couple of books of S&H Green Stamps in the 1960s, but they were seldom used except for distance viewing at things like sporting events.Īs in all activities with a following, adherents differ on the definitions.
Growing up in the Midwest, nature was just something that was – I collected fireflies, watched out for bunny nests in the grassy yard and knew Robin’s eggs were blue. You could say I came to this whole nature thing late in life.
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