Linda Weiford

If you've been watching the goings-on at your backyard feeder, you may have noticed: Birds become bullies in spring.

Chances are, you've never seen a jackalope in the wild. Or tasted a milk-chocolate version retrieved from an Easter basket. Hippity, hoppity, there are horns atop his head.

If you see a bumblebee buzzing around our region's early-blooming flowers, it's a queen. Roused by warming temperatures, she recently emerged from overwintering in a grape-sized hole in the ground to

Talk about a spring fling. The annual mating ritual of garter snakes is underway, where multiple males intertwine with a single female like a roiling mass of spaghetti noodles.

You’re enjoying a picnic lunch at a park when you spot an eye-catching bird perched on a ponderosa branch. Dressed in deep blue plumage and a showy black crest atop its head, the bird is elegant, stately.

The Great Basin spadefoot toad reeks of peanuts, has shovels on its feet and likes to hunker below ground until it rains or thunders overhead. It also makes a sound akin to a dozing duck.

On this Mother's Day, let's honor hummingbird moms everywhere with a bouquet of nectar-filled flowers. When it comes to motherhood, this tiny bird weighing little more than a ping-pong ball truly does it all.

Be on the lookout for the Julia orangetip butterfly, as its springtime presence in the Inland Northwest is brief.

As our nation prepares to commemorate America's war dead on Memorial Day, let's salute a feathered war hero that strutted and cooed. The pigeon.

You're walking outside or working in the yard when you spot a blob of frothy bubbles on a blade of grass or plant stalk. “Did someone spit on my lawn?” you wonder.