Come Walk with Me
@ ThankU.io 

We used to see foxes near our house. Then we got corgis, and some of our wilder neighbors wisely kept their distance. Years later, after the corgis were gone, I looked outside one morning and discovered that at least one old neighbor had returned. The first fox we saw near our house stayed down the hill, slipping through the brush and keeping his distance. Then we got our corgis, and the neighborhood changed. The bobcats stopped coming onto the deck. The raccoons stopped comi

My first pigeons were the fat, determined city pigeons Grandpa fed from a pocketful of peanuts in Golden Gate Park. The pigeons outside my window today are an entirely different crowd. Tall, elegant and beautifully dressed. At least until they all pile into the feeder together. I knew pigeons long before I knew juncos. My grandparents lived on Waller Street in San Francisco, and when we visited them in the 1950s, Grandpa would walk down through the Panhandle to the children's

Twenty-four years ago, when we first moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains, we put out some birdseed and waited. And waited. Finally, one little gray bird arrived. We didn't even know what he was. We named him Fat Freddy, pulled out our bird book and discovered our first mountain junco. When we moved to the mountain 24 years ago, we didn't know much about birds. Down in Silicon Valley, we knew the usual suspects: robins, scrub jays, chickadees and sparrows, with an occasional mou