Certainly the most difficult North American family of birds to see, let alone photograph, are the Rails. While there are some 139 species of Ralidae worldwide, WC in this post focuses on the six “true” North American Rails.¹ WC has photos of five of them – for a given definition of “photo” – and is highly unlikely (to the point of near certainty) to ever see let alone photograph the sixth. But that’s getting ahead of the tale.

By far the least difficult – WC wouldn’t say “easy” – Rail to photograph is the Sora. Unlike other Rails, it occasionally actually comes out into the open, especially when foraging to feed its young. The big, bright yellow bill and black chin and neck make the species unmistakeable in the field. It’s very widely distributed, found all across the continent and even in parts of…

WC has exhausted his collection of even marginally presentable photos of Trogons, so we will move on to another family of birds, the Thrushes, the taxonomic family Turdidae. There are some 174 species of Thrushes spread across 18 genera. Some will be immediately familiar. Some will surprise you. WC has photographed only a small fraction of this large, widespread family of birds. But we will start with the largest member of that family, the Great Thrush. Spoiler alert: it’s good, but not really great.

The Great Thrush can weigh as much as 175 grams; for comparison, a big American Robin might weigh 77 grams. Some subspecies run to 33 centimeters in length; the America Robin is about 25 centimeters. The dark gray body, orange bill and legs are pretty distinctive; in the males, the orange eye ring is definitive.

This is a montane species, rarely…

It’s not a desert, although the area only gets about seven inches of precipitation a year, on average. It’s a playa, the dry bed of a former lake, and it’s about 8 miles wide and 70 miles long. The surface of the dry lake bottom is absolutely, unnervingly flat, and bare of any visible trace of life. WC was there last just week.

The playa surface is at an elevation of about 4,060 feet. It’s high desert. The block fault face of Steens Mountain towers over the playa, rising more than a mile overhead. Steens Mountain was intermittently glaciated in the late Pleistocene and Pliocene, from 3.5 million years to 15,000 years ago. No ordinary lake can survive for 3.5 million years; they fill up with sediment. But the Alvord Playa is part of a graben, a fault-bounded block of…