Backyard and Beyond

On a winter day, a short-eared owl drops down into a grassland, talons extended to snag a vole, a dietary staple. A northern harrier – a hawk that often shares the same hunting territories and

Owls can be easier to spot in wintertime: great horned owls start hooting and nesting while we’re still in winter’s grip, and barred owls aren’t far behind. And an elusive screech owl may turn up

Patience and persistence paid off recently for both a beautiful red-tailed hawk and photographer Bret Cool: Cool got a standout photo and the hawk got its prey. “I watched the hawk move from perch to

Take a holiday decoration purchased at a big box store, add a rope hanger and, voila! you have a great setting to photograph winter’s birds as they fly in to feed. Rich Carlson snapped a

Trumpeter swans are such handsome, regal birds that it’s sometimes hard to remember that they’re dabbling waterfowl that tip upside down to find a meal in the same manner in which mallards and other waterfowl

A young American kestrel perches on top of a post in Carl Richard’s photo.
This youngster recently fledged from a nest box in a large park near Richard’s home, and even though we don’t

Adam Carlson caught a fine photo of October’s comet, the Tsuchinshan-Atlas, named for the Chinese and South African observatories that first spotted it. This space rock from the outer reaches of our solar system passed

Luck, skill, and patience: These are the Big 3 in an outdoor photographer’s tool kit. Kip Earney called on all three as he hunkered down in the bulrushes along a Mississippi River backwater some months