Introducing Urban Nature

My goal here is to share the view from my window. It's high above the street in a city, yet I keep binoculars at my desk because of the surprising variety of wildlife I can see without leaving my seat. There's a lot around us if we just pay attention.

The big nature news in the FiDi these days is not visible from my window, though. It's visible from the computer next to my window. The peregrine falcons who nest on the PG&E building in San Francisco have incubated four red eggs for the last month, and now those eggs are fuzzy white chicks. You can see them at www.scpbrg.org.

I sometimes see one or the other falcon from my window. They are usually moving far too fast, or are too far away, for me to tell which one I see. (The female is much larger than the male, and her chest is a little more orange.) Today, however, I saw only California gulls and pairs of soaring ravens.

My view of the butterfly migration seems to be over; in the past few weeks I've seen large numbers of butterflies, all headed north, but today I saw none.