Two weeks ago this morning I was in high clover–among vegetation and birdlife unlike anything around here, that’s for sure. Sarasota is another world, and on a beautiful balmy morning surrounded by herons and ibises and spoonbills and ducks and……
Forest: a bunch of trees. A product. A profit source for shareholders. A place where something useful might be built. Forest: a living community of interconnected lifeforms, above and below ground, that breathes oxygen, captures and stores CO2, communicates across…
I’m having returning waves of nausea after accidentally allowing malevolent rays in through the closed drapes I had hoped would quarantine me from bizarro world. By way of a chink in the blinks came recent news items belching details of the ongoing stranger-than-fiction conversion to…
“You can’t plant a forest.” This was one the things spoken by poet WS Merwin in last night’s final SustainFloyd Movie Night at the Floyd Country Store. The poignancy of the short, simple statement might have escaped notice by some, even…
Our prescription for an easy fire is this: just toss a couple of cones under the kindling. Then, if you must, use a match. But if you have time, wait for the resin to ignite from last night’s coals. It…
They are never duplicitous or deceitful. They are not envious of more powerful or attractive members of their group nor do they seek more creature comforts than is their hardwired destiny. They may stink or sting, buzz and bump their…
Structure–even frail and fragile and failing structure–seems preferable to sudden and complete disorder. The center does not hold. The old logic is suddenly devoid of common understanding. Change for its own sake yields a horrible tsunami of ambiguity and chaos where…
Towards the end of writing elsewhere about the start of the writing habit–and later, the shift toward writing from, for and about nature–I’ve been revisiting the earliest days of the blog via the Wayback Machine. So don’t say you weren’t…
Some day I’ll post my bigger-picture thoughts that come from this image taken after rock-hopping across Nameless Creek yesterday. Today, there’s time for only the image I’m afraid. Off to have a short session in town along with other SustainFloyd board…
This Pearl Crescent (my best guess at ID–click image to enlarge) makes a final stop for nectar before–what? Has this butterly already laid eggs to overwinter while the adults will succumb to the first hard freeze? If the latter, this…
There have been some issues with the blog overnight, I learned this morning, so am not sure this will post, will post correctly or will persist in the corrupted blog database. Don’t ask me. I just type here. I am…
We had almost exactly 4 inches of rain from Matthew and related weather cells last week. I finally got around to emptying the gauge yesterday,  and to my surprise, there at the bottom of the reservoir was this (unfortunately dead) red-backed…
Whatever it is (if anything more than the zigzag of z’s below center stage) they’d better write it quickly and close up shop. The cool damp makes sluggish morning spiders easy enough victims of bird breakfasts that I’d expect to…
We did not get out to view the bioluminescence of this cluster of Jack’o’lantern mushrooms last night due to the much-needed rain. It is raining still. And the [ look carefully ]Â unknown salamander, I suppose, is happy as a pig…