This time of year I sometimes feel like a castaway walking to the edge of the surf and looking long and hard at the horizon. Inside the house here, plants that can’t overwinter outside are struggling: some of the Calendula succumbed to aphids; the rosemary dried — it likes neither electric heat nor wet feet, …
Daylight, skunk
I recently wrote a poem called “Skunk, Twilight”, which I include below. It sometimes happens, despite every good intention to walk during the week, that the time gets away, and especially in these short winter days, the sun is down before you know it. We have barely nine and a half hours between sunrise and …
A dairy road walk
The movie Gone with the Wind has an intermission. It’s almost inconceivable nowadays that a movie released by a major studio would need an intermission. While they’ve ebbed and flowed a little, most films clock in at between an hour forty minutes and two hours. Alfred Hitchcock said the length of a movie should be …
Hitting the window
In January of 2013 three conservation biologists, all with a professional interest in migratory birds, published a study in Nature Communications (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2380) titled “The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States”. It was picked up and widely reported in the mainstream media. What got everyone’s attention was the claim that cats …
Woodhouse’s Scrub-Jay
Cold. A little snow. The cottontail is out between flurries, nibbling on the pale grass. She looks up when I turn the car down the drive, with an expression that can only be described as woeful. Someone on Facebook, of course, will be summiting a mountain; a friend will post a picture with people you …
Untranslatable
The Irish word tenalach, we’re told in breathless Internet posts, is untranslatable in English. Which means, of course, that there is a translation but it’s long and flowery — the verbal equivalent of a scented candle — and in this particular case, the following: “Tenalach: A relationship one has with the land, air, and water; …
The Full Black-billed Magpie Moon
Uncle Frank had an observatory at the bottom of his garden and a penny-farthing bicycle. Either one would have made him fascinating to a kid, but while the bicycle was a cool curiosity (I remember him briefly riding it around out back), we preferred the observatory. (In truth, Frank probably wasn’t related to us at …
Migratory Thrush
When I was a boy, robins were plump little things with cranberry-red breasts. They usually came with a sprig of English Holly. My experience of them was confined to the graphical: they were on Christmas cards from Gran or Auntie Millie, almost every year, and they were European Robins — not the big-bodied thrush of …
Advanced ignorance
One of the ambitions of a good naturalist, it seems to me, should be to build up enough knowledge that, when asked about this or that plant or animal, they can say with great confidence, “I don’t know”. In my experience the best ones say it a lot. New citizen scientists — budding botanists, fledgling …
Strange birds
Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in …
