Maybe they won’t be quite as fast to disappear from the scene as the climate warms–according to a recent study. Salamanders show more resistance to global warming than previously believed As a life-long resident of the southern Appalachians, you might…
No Really. That is being posited as the source of the many-faceted oddness of the 8-tentacled creature that has been shoehorned into the mollusk group but really, in many ways, is such an outlier that it seems like it came…
Regrettably, we have a long distance relationship with our grand daughters. Looking back a couple of decades from now, their memories of their mother’s parents will be sporadic visits to Goose Creek or on their home turf for a long…
Below are some annotated bits from an article in Wired that describe the early successes in the battle to find weapons against the increasingly numerous and increasingly virulent microbes that are resistant to all known antibiotics. We worry about the…
Spotted Lantern Fly now in Virginia. “A potentially very serious pest of grapes, peaches, hops, and a variety of other crops, the spotted lanternfly (SLF), Lycorma delicatula, was detected in Frederick County, Virginia, on Jan. 10, 2018.” It’s host plant for…
One of the places I stand and ponder in our daily silvan peregrinations is up back, beyond the last extent of floodplain of which our five-acre pastureland is the remainder. Beyond that point, the path skirts high above the rock…
Yesterday, your neighbor’s yellow lab gave birth to a litter of puppies. Today, the owner has made up his mind to do one of the following: to turn them outdoors to fend for themselves in the heat and take their…
Mountain Lake (on Salt Pond Mountain) in Giles County, Virginia, was familiar territory once upon a time. I took five-week-long studies at the UVa Biological Station there in the summers of 1977 and 1978. I have been back a few…
It has not been a spectacular year for fall colors in our part of the Southern Appalachians. The prolonged late-summer drought seems likely to have contributed to the subdued palette, but the alchemy of autumn is a many-splendored mystery with…
Most people might think it’s a good thing–that there are demonstrably and significantly fewer insects than there were three decades ago. But consider that these morels are critical links between the primary producers (grasses and other greenery that turns sun…
Innoculate, Feed, Wait, Observe We are living in the midst and are each of us part of a great experiment. There is no control group laid out to co-exist on a planet where our species has NOT altered the chemistry…
In eighteen summers on Goose Creek, this is the first rat snake (of scores) that was not black. Most have no hint of a pattern on the dorsal surface; this one does. We’ve transported four snakes to other parts after…
I suppose technically we are not in a drought. Parts of the county have gotten more from recent storms than we have gotten on Goose Creek. So I’m glad the creek still flows, even if just barely enough to keep…
Somehow, the silent working of this spider, relentlessly, tirelessly doing the next thing, spinning the threads of another day of waiting, not knowing… Somehow, the regular, expert lines of concentric effort with a plan, not so much in mind as…