Digital Maps to Nature Literacy
TOOLS TO MEET OUR NEEDS We create tools to work for us: to dig foundations, to hoist steel girders for bridges, to record our words and thoughts for others or capture a likeness of another in a silver emulsion of…
Category Outdoors
Life in The Cloud
Ah yes. Now I remember. Life in the cloud. It was mysterious and eerie and the relentless fog lent a kind of drama to the aloneness that first year in Floyd County living, just me and the cat, on Walnut…
Music, Mountains and Big Trees
Back in December, I was offered the opportunity to contribute a “500-700 word article on Southwest Virginia’s outdoors or nature” by the Crooked Road folks. It now appears (on page 23) in the program guide for next week’s Mountains of…
Mountain Lake(less)
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…
Parts South
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……
Flights of Fancy
We will, overriding our former determination to never again leave the ground, fly off in the not too distant future, to a somewhat far-off landscape that is not the mountains. I will have  window -seat neck pain, of course, and this time,…
The Buck Stops Here
You’ll note that I have protected the anonymity of the hunter as well as taking the precautionary measure of doing the same to the deer, so as to avoid any legal actions by relatives of the deceased. I can count…
Today’s Puzzler: Ah Nuts
These spiny things are all over our forest trail. Together with a mother-lode of hickory nuts, they carpet the forest floor. It is, as they say, a heavy mast year–which the old timers says look out for a doozy of…
Extravagance of Weeds: Velvet Leaf
This is how easily I am enthralled: Yesterday I had a little “assignment” to be at Riverstone Farm at 8 a.m. to shoot photos of the SustainFloyd refrigerated truck as it was loaded with local produce for delivery to Floyd…
Nature Hike on Goose Creek: Sign Up!
Take a slow, intentional-attentive walk in the woods with naturalist-photographer-author Fred First. Focus will be on the bigger-picture understanding of ecology and geology of this southern Appalachian landscape but especially will focus on the finer early-autumn details of fern, flower…
What Black Bears Do in the Woods
The dogs–yes, plural, we still have our grand-pup with us: the one you can enjoy and then send home to the parents (neighbors)–were disturbed most of the day yesterday by something over on the barn side of the road. They…
The Cry of a Baby, The Big Eyes, The Innocence
Since the severe snow-covered winter of 2009, the “rats on stilts” as I used to call them have not been the constant army against us that they once were. So now instead of fifteen deer of an evening browsing cavalierly…
Forget Me Not Likes Its Feet Wet
This summer wildflower has been abundant in the years when it was not absent entirely. It grows with its roots saturated in creek water, and when spring and early summer is dry, we don’t see this yellow-eyed sporadic along Goose…
Forest, Undressing
The bark from this dead and rotting tree sagged down around the tree’s base like an overstretched sock around an Entling’s ankles. Long ago were gone its branches, leaves and twigs, so that not much was left to show for…