BlueBird Breakfast
I posted this morning over at Substack where the friction is less than here in WordPress. You can go there and read my musings about diets and digestion, with more to come about bugs for breakfast in your own bowl…
Category Nature
Birds Behaving Badly
I could not resist the alliteration, even though this you-wanna-piece-of-me Osprey (from Sarasota 2017 visit) is the baddest bird I could find in my limited ornithographic collection. Yes I made up a word. So sue me. I did have a…
Dodd Creek Trail: Getting There
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post short entries from the observations, images and thoughts that have come from two back-to-back early September visits to a local walking trail called “the Dodd Creek Trail.” In a few weeks, you…
Simple Pleasures
We had 3 widely-spaced friends (read that as you will) over for a porch visit yesterday evening to become reacquainted as the good friends we had been before covid. And what we rediscovered was how interesting ORDINARY used to be,…
On Seeing Things
When is the last time you stretched out on your back under a sky full of clouds? Your mind literally cannot help but make sense of the seemingly random balloonings or smears or pulled threads of clouds. It is what…
New Ground
We walked through our tiny patch of forest (compared to Goose Creek) in the rain–of course, in the Monsoon of June–on our third full day at what I used to refer to as The Other Place. It is now This…
Global Worming
Non-native earthworms are perhaps the most serious of invasive land pests. Learn about them and avoid spreading them when possible.
Landscape, Place and Memory
This topic of recent interest holds the potential for a vastly expanded ramble, with a point and even a conclusion perhaps, in another life time. But for now… Suffice it to say that I have been revisiting the mysteries of…
Even At The Gates
I looked up from the kitchen window about 10 minutes before we were to depart for a hike and pot-luck across the county. WhatDaWhat! There not thirty feet away was a cluster of bittersweet (you never find just ONE Oriental…
A Cicadian Pox of Conidial Pustules
Yes, it does sound like a medieval incantation of doom. This is one for you from Nature’s Book of Bad Dreams. Seems we have among us a fungus that infects periodic cicadas in a most bizarre and ghoulishly effective way.…
What Native Plants?
We rounded the bend on Griffith Creek last week to find a hundred yards of creekside lined thickly with a flat-topped pink-flowered shrub I recognized as Spirea, a member of the rose family. But the members of the genus I…
(extra)Ordinary Nearby Nature
I’d never seen a horntail wasp until I saw this one last week, but knew at a glance what it was. Note the horn on the tail, just above its rather short, stout ovipositor. It is NOT a stinger. And…
Pollinia: How Milkweeds Do It
It seemed simple enough. On the Blue Ridge Parkway on the way back from an oil change yesterday, and in no particular hurry. I pulled off to the shoulder of the road and grabbed my camera (which you can also…
Spontaneous Flora of Floyd
One of my favorite features on the trip to town along 221 this time of year is the wildflower assortment, the “unplanted garden” in which yellow is disproportionately well represented. Much less familiar than the yellow-rayed Black Eyed Susans or…