WC has only seen three wolverines the wild. And none of them resulted in a photo.

WC saw the first on the third day of a torrential rainstorm, washed out of an attempt to climb Scott Peak, hiking out down Sunset Creek in Denali National Park. That wolverine was loping steadily upstream – the gait is unmistakable – on the other side of the flood-swollen creek in the hard rain, not looking any happier drenched than we did.

The second was on a canoe trip down the Delta River. Another canoe had capsized, and we were on the west bank, drying stuff out and warming the cold, wet folks up, when a wolverine came down a cut bank maybe 50 meters downstream on the other side of the river. The animal calmly drank a little water, sniffed the…

A close cousin to last week’s Black-headed Nightingale-Thrush, this is another of the eight Catharus Nightingale-Thrushes. The species has the smallest range of that genus, extending across the highlands of central Costa Rica and into the mountains of western Panama. Within that range it is confined to the higher slopes, from about 1,800 meters up to the tree line.

It forages mostly on the ground, but occasionally on lower epiphytes in the forests. Its foraging behavior is much like the American Robin’s, probing the ground, scratching, occasionally tossing leaves and moving by hopping from place to place. It feeds mostly on insects, but occasionally on fruit.

The systematics of the species are unsettled, with the authorities arguing there are between two and four subspecies. The populations tend to be isolated from each other by the higher slopes of the two mountain ranges…

This post is for WC’s friend, Nils Warnock, a consummate birder. He has forgotten more about birds and birding than WC will ever learn. He has carte blanc to correct all of WC’s errors.

To misquote Calvin and Hobbs, there are about a bazillion flycatchers. Among the Tyrannidae, the New World’s Tyrant Flycatchers alone, there are 425 species spread across 101 genera. Many of them, especially the 15 members of the genus Empidonax, look pretty much the same, and some can only be distinguished by subtle behavioral cues or vocalizations. If at all. So this blog post, which WC thinks features three different Empids, offers uncertain identifications. So it goes.

We’ll start with one of the “easier” Empids. The Cordilleran Flycatcher used to be the Western Flycatcher, but that species was split into the Cordilleran and Pacific Slope Flycatchers a…