The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

August 5, 2026

On this August morning, after nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the canyon is emerald green with chlorophyll-bursting life. At last, those of the hemoglobin kind take their rightful place in the world. We are only food for plants. They feed us oxygen until we ripen, then eat us when we’re dead.

Today’s astonishing wisdom from the Universe while I sit on the porch.

For me, Nature isn’t an escape from reality but a penetration. The trees and birds and insects—even the consuming mosquitoes. I’m not hiding. I’m connecting.

Last weekend, I connected with the high ponderosa forests of northern Arizona, with morning-porch birds like pygmy nuthatches, mountain chickadees, and western flycatchers and other species I only see in winter like dark-eyed juncos and Steller’s jays.

There were long walks in pine-clad meadows along dry creeks under monsoon skies with grandchildren. There were gartersnakes and frogs and a giant, five-legged darkling beetle named “Legoless” that rode calmly attached to the front of Gia’s shirt.

And there were tadpoles. Millions of them.

Eleven-year-old Giavanna was on a mission to save them. Not so much from the chocolate-colored puddle in the forest road, quickly shrinking to an alphabet soup of squirming letter Qs, but from the knobby tires of ATVs. She put up barricades and hand-painted warning signs and still they came, crushing and splashing the larval toads into mud cakes.

She had three aquariums full of tadpoles in her bedroom. “It’s a swamp, and it smells like one.” Her mother, the Middle Daughter, implored me with her eyes to do something. So, Gia and I reduced the tanks to one and moved it to the library. And I brought home three five-gallon buckets of amphibian gelatine, promising to return after metamorphosis.

And why not? This isn’t a granddad thing.

Tadpoles connect me to that childhood place where I registered astonishment at everything, at my pockets filled with the wonders of snakes and lizards and slime-trailing gastropods coiled inside their tawny shells. At the shining minnows schooling inside my red Radio Flyer wagon where I dumped them from a bucket. At the sweaty, swarming frenzy of life all around me.

Like an aquarium full of the promise of hundreds of toads.

Thanks for reading! More to come as I’m back in the yard watching the fall migration unfold…

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