Once you see a shoebill — or even a picture of a shoebill — you never forget it. This unusual bird looks like a cross between a stork, a pelican, and a dinosaur, both fearsome and comical. I had seen the pictures. Now I wanted to see one in the…

The chance to see mountain gorillas in the wild draws many tourists to Uganda every year. For Craig and me, gorillas were only one of many attractions in this beautiful country (chimpanzees! tree-climbing lions! and don’t forget all the amazing birds!) — but they were definitely high on our list.…

It’s five o’clock in the morning at our lodge on the edge of Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in southwestern Uganda, and we’re gearing up for our morning of tracking mountain gorillas in the Ruhija section of the park. I’m dressed head to toe in the full panoply of gorilla-safari…

This little red bird doesn’t look like much (especially in this dreadfully grainy shot), but he is in fact a vermillion flycatcher, who really had no business whatsoever being in north-central California at the end of November (or any other time, for that matter). And yet there he was —…

Where the Okavango River flows from Angola, through Namibia, and into northwestern Botswana, it spreads out to form a vast wetland covering as much as 5800 square miles, before finally sinking into the sands of the Kalahari Desert. Five main channels cut through the Okavango Delta, and innumerable smaller waterways…

Last November, with Covid cases spiking all over the country, Craig and I decided to celebrate our seventh anniversary by driving our camper out to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex to see the migrating birds. These refuges are part of the Pacific Flyway, one of four north-south bird migration…