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…
It disturbs me not a little that Japanese Stilt Grass, Autumn Olive, Oriental Bittersweet, Garlic Mustard and (Alabama horror come true) Kudzu is invading Floyd County. As a biology watcher for more than a half century and as one who…
…or a liberal hoax after all. Granted, human memory can be a leaky sieve and the tendency to make things markedly WORSE or BETTER “when I was a boy” is pretty common. But here is a way to put facts…
Where are we headed in the love-hate relationship of HumanKind with Nature (that is: the biotic and abiotic parts of the only planet we have from which all our resources are drawn)? Â It can’t be much farther in the…
Labor Day for many marks (or used to mark) the end of summer and the return of the kids to school. By that time, Floyd County students will have been in sweltering classrooms for almost a month. But that is…
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…
I had an epiphany some years back, and until this morning, I had thought that this particular insight had been free of any influence but the AHA observation: how much human or animal muscle it would have taken to push…
I promise. Not fake news. Not an alternative fact. I did see this. On Goose Creek. Yesterday. It’s Planet Floyd. Trust me. I’m a stable genius. The above is true. Except for the stable part. And the genius thing. I…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The intricate design of the Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) was a marvel for me in 1970 when I was a student on a field trip to the Smokies from Auburn University. Systematic Botany was a wake-up call to a budding…