Spring at Full Tilt
Don’t know about you, but for us, spring happened on Saturday (20 April.) By Sunday, the foliage of almost all trees was at least barely emerged, if not half-way, the sun setting spring colors ablaze. It is a different orange,…
Category Nature
Who Thinks Up These Beings Anyways?
Once again, I’m taking the easy way out. I’m happy to share–need to, even–lest I finally accept the eddys are good enough and just hush. So nothing fancy. No eye candy. Just the facts, m’am. Not surprisingly, it is the…
The Root of All Weevil
Spontaneous generation? They just are there–in the five pound bag of flour you just brought home yesterday. There, in the mixing bowl that was going to hold the biscuits for dinner, but now, in a puff of white smoke, ground…
Fruits of Florence: Fecundity of Fungi
I happened through a fairly mature oak-hickory forest on the grounds of Warm Hearth Retirement Community yesterday. With the road being surfaced, the woods became the alternative route to my car parked well beyond the paving trucks. I smelled them…
Already Missing the Insects of Autumn
In an earlier column I confessed my (and my hapless wife’s) checkered association with snakes and so I suppose it’s a short step to admit that I also have an inordinate admiration as well for insects–for joint-legged animals (arthropods) in…
Giant Hogweed is Here
I recently had the opportunity to ask one of the most knowledgeable botanists I know as many pertinent questions out of my confused and confusing plants folder as I could tastefully work into the conversation. “Have you run across Giant…
All in a Day’s Web
Yet another spider web. This one, freshly minted, just opened for business. Another day, another web. If you’re an orb-weaver, it’s your work. It’s what you do. No big deal. But I never tire of wondering how the radians are…
Balm of Gilead
Neither of these words in the title are likely too familiar, and less so in these parts the tree that sometimes goes by that common name. Balm of course is a soothing ointment, and Gilead is in Israel. There is…
Birds of A Feather: The Flocking Part
Scroll to the end for how to get rid of flocking birds. Better living through technology… But first, a remembered gathering of blackbirds in autumn, more than a decade ago… Vox Populi The house was chilly when I got home–cooler…
Cuckoo for Caterpillars
They look awful, and seem to threaten the forest with ultimate consumption–the fall web worms whose unsightly tents of silk tatter the margins of roadways and fields in autumn. What many people don’t realize is that, in the end, the…
Seventeen Years Not Wanting to Know
I am reading the NYT special called “Losing Earth. The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.” If you want a video summary, here is an interview with the author, Nathaniel Rich, on Democracy Now. It portrays the choices we once…
Not New To Science But To Me: Spikenard
I was alerted of a low tire by the pressure sensor dashboard light before I reached the hardtop one day last week. So I pulled off at the next wide place along our gravel road and plugged in the small…
Abbott’s Sphinx Moth Caterpillar
As if I knew this beauty–or even did the work to key it out for myself. I’d never seen it, and failing in a five-minute scroll of Google and Bing images of North American caterpillars, I resorted to a kind…
Audubon’s Crow
If you have an interest in birds and art and writing and natural history in general, bookmark John J. Audubon’s Birds of America. He did not only seek out (and shoot) and paint a vast number of American birds. He also…