I started my morning on the formerly stark white beaches of the Gulf Islands National Seashore just east of Pensacola, Florida. The oil impacts on the coastal barrier islands have not yet reached the level I saw in Alabama but the entire tide line was peppered with gelatinous black tar mats. The islands are very low lying and composed of flats and low dunes. All it will take is one good storm to inundate large portions of the islands should oil be in the area.

The area I visited is a major nesting area for Least Terns and a few Black Skimmers. Both species are ground nesters and nest just above the high tide line. Some birds were still on eggs, probably making there second attempt at nesting this season, and others had fully grown young that they were feeding small fish. Soon, all the young will take to the water to feed on their own.

From the Gulf Islands I moved west. I am making my way to Louisiana. I stopped at Orange Beach in Alabama where I again saw oil and dispersant residue making its way to shore. I then took the ferry across Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island where I’m staying tonight. I met a man in Orange Beach who told me crews were hauling clean sand in at night in an attempt to cover up the contaminated sand and keep the tourists coming in for the fourth of July. The waters there were disgusting. The surface has a milky brown sheen. It doesn’t look or move like water should.

Here are a few quick shots from the day:

One of the larger dunes in the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

Black Skimmer chick.

Adult Black Skimmer returning to its colony.

Least tern chick standing in shallow coastal water. Tern and Skimmer chicks are highly mobile and often make their way to the oceans edge where they encounter whatever is there. Imagine what a large oil event would do to one of these colonies.

Oil spill responders at Orange Beach, Alabama.

Lady taking a cell phone photo of the oiled waters off Orange Beach, Alabama.

Oil and dispersant making its way to shore at Orange Beach.

Oiled Great Blue Heron in a tidal marsh at the Gulf Islands National Seashore. I've begun to realize that if you look close enough there is some sort of oil contamination on the majority of birds. The lower back, wings and legs of this bird have visible oil.

Dolphin and oil response vessels in Mobile Bay, Alabama.

I visited several areas today around Gulf Shores on the south side of Mobile Bay. As was to be expected after seeing the oil really roll in last night there were a few heavily oiled birds in the area. One thing that was particularly disturbing to find were a number of oiled Snowy Plovers. Snowy Plovers are a candidate for listing under the endangered species act. Their numbers are already in jeopardy due to coastal development in their preferred habitat – basically undisturbed beaches and coastal dunes just beyond the high-tide/storm surge line. I’m afraid of what the months ahead hold in store for these shorebirds and the thousands of northern migrants that will use these beaches during migration and winter.

Oiled Snowy Plover trying desperately to preen.

Oiled Snowy Plover - Not all of the oil shows up as brown. This birds feathers were basically all stuck together by a sticky film of oil giving it a disheveled look.

An oiled Laughing Gull standing beside a clean adult.

This oiled Laughing Gull attempted to fly on several occasions with little success.

An early morning cleanup crew driving down the beach. Crews are literally just hauling the worst looking sand away.

Sea turtle nest on Bon Secour National Wildlife Refuge. Crews are marking nests to protect them from oil spill responders and actually moving some nests farther up on the beach to protect them from the oil seeping into the shoreline

Natural gas well and a shrimp boat turned skimmer in Mobile Bay

These Brown Pelicans in Mobile Bay looked relatively unaffected by oil thus far.

Like most, I have watched the BP oil leak from afar – feeling a mix of anger at the industry that caused it and fearing that the long term ecological consequences will be far more devastating than the disturbing images we’ve seen on television and in print – those things happening silently beneath the water that may take lifetimes to recover. Tonight as I walked on an Alabama beach I felt something else. I felt complete and utter despair. I saw miles of beautiful white sand turned into a blackened toxic mess. I saw families standing silently by the shoreline staring blankly at the sea. I watched a flotilla of coast guard and shrimp boats trying futilely to capture the black masses before they reached the shore. I breathed the oil into my lungs and felt the sticky mess on my skin. At sunset, the waves turned a coppery purple as they rose and fell.

I don’t know what else to say. I’m exhausted and my hotel shower has a black ring around it that won’t wash off.

The oil as it was arriving - Gulf Shores, Alabama

High marks of the first waves carrying the oil to shore

Oil response workers installing pom-poms along a small stretch of the Alabama coast

An oil response worker looks out at the shrimp boats helping with oil recovery

Heavy oil on the beach

Oil and cottages

BP owes me a new pair of Tevas

Here are a few new photos from the shorebird migration at Gray’s Harbor, Washington this spring.

Last night I was camped out along a rugged logging road deep in the boreal forest of Alberta. It was a foggy drizzly day rendering the dense forest especially foreboding and mysterious. In the late afternoon a pair of ravens winged overhead and erupted in to their guttural raucous calls somewhere not too far off in the trees. Almost immediately, a pair of Great Horned Owls began to emphatically duet with their deep hooting calls in the same area. Suspecting the owls may be protesting the ravens presence near their nest or young I grabbed a camera and set off to investigate. I wove my way through the dense forest of lichen encrusted spruces, jack pines and larch toward the hooting owls. Eventually I entered a grove of large aspens and perched ahead of me were two fledgling Great Horned Owls.

Fledgling Great Horned Owl

The adults were nearby but elusive. They had stopped hooting in earnest as the ravens had departed but occasionally I heard them utter soft hoots in conversation with each other and I caught glimpses of their pale ghostly forms as they winged through the forest behind several layers of trees – always keeping a safe distance from me and limiting my line of site on them. Finally I saw one perch and crept over the soft carpet of mosses underfoot to a spot where I was obstructed but had a clear view of the owl through a gap in the tree I was under.

Adult female Great Horned Owl

It was a fantastically beautiful animal – pale and frosted as many in the north are – and wild eyed. A perfect keeper of this primeval forest.

I have begun the long and tedious task of scanning my historical slide archive and will be posting some of the images here from time to time. Luckily I have some motivation to do so as I’m getting the chance to look back through many memorable experiences and exciting moments!

I started the process by scanning one of my favorite North American birds – the Yellow-billed Loon. The Yellow-billed Loon is our largest loon and breeds in the far northern reaches of Alaska and Western Canada. In the United States the vast majority of Yellow-billed Loons breed in the National Petroleum Reserve putting them at great risk of disturbance from future energy development there.

Yellow-billed Loon

I photographed these individuals many years ago while doing breeding bird surveys on the Colville River Delta in Alaska. Normally these birds are rather wary but I located a spot the year prior to the one in which I took these photos where I thought I’d have a chance of getting close to them. The following year I had about 20 minutes to hike to these birds and try for a few images before a helicopter was to pick up the crew I was working with. The birds were right where I left them a season before and I slowly crawled toward a small lobe of the large lake they were nesting on. Once there I got lucky – the light brightened for a few minutes and I had one of my most memorable moments in the Alaskan Arctic as one member of the pair swam, preened and called just meters away from me. The Yellow-billed Loon is one of the most charismatic birds I have ever had the pleasure to observe.

Since these images were taken an airstrip and oil drilling pad have been built just a kilometer or so away in the middle of the Colville Delta changing the place forever.

I had the opportunity to appear on NPR’s Morning Edition this week. Click the link to see some photos of grouse on NPR’s website.

My photographs and article on the status of the endangered and enigmatic Ivory Gull are now available on line at the Living Bird website

An adult Ivory Gull perched on sea ice in the Canadian Arctic

White-nose Syndrome is a mysterious disease that is currently decimating bat populations in the northeastern United States. First observed near Albany, New York in 2006, it had spread as far as Virginia by 2009. Scientists fear this disease could rapidly push an entire group of species to extinction and will trigger unknown ecological consequences. Why the bats are dying remains a mystery.

I accompanied researchers to several caves and mines in New York and Vermont during the winter of 2009 in an effort to document the situation. This piece is a result of that effort and aims to communicate the urgency of the situation to the public and policy-makers and to elicit an emotional response to a group of species that are often disregarded or disliked.

Getting up at 5:00 in the morning and hiking in the dark to a cold cramped blind is not most peoples idea of a good time. And I must admit it seems a bit crazy to me at times as well – I would much rather be sleeping in. But I wish everyone could experience the feeling of sitting there in the dark and suddenly being surrounded by the wild sounds of stomping, hooting, chuckling Sharp-tailed Grouse. This morning the lek I was on was a good one. As many as 31 males and 10 females were present and the activity of the displaying males was frantic and concentrated in a very small area unlike other grouse species.

A group of female Sharp-tailed Grouse clustered in the center of the lek before sunrise

Tomorrow I’m heading for my final destination before returning to New York. I’ll be visiting a large Greater Sage-Grouse lek near Lander, Wyoming.

A displaying male Sharp-tailed Grouse