A calm, blue-sky May day, with the Turkey River running clear and stable. Spring migrants singing from the trees along the river banks. Redhorse spawning on the gravel bars. Could there be a better day for a leisurely canoe float? Even before Margaret and I launched our boat, the turkey vultures put on a …
As an organizer of the FIRST Earth Day, in 1970, I celebrate the 50th anniversary. Yes, I mean FIRST. We University of Michigan students held our “Give Earth a Chance!” rallies early, because we were going to be on spring break on April 22. Earth Day succeeded! Visionaries and activists demanding a better world saw …
I like pork. Always have. Even when I had to earn my bacon and ham and sausage and chops by shoveling manure from the hog shed on the small Warren County farm where I grew up. But these days I shy away from “the other white meat,” as some marketing genius tried to depict it. …
Happy SNOWY New Year! At least here in Clayton County . . . Nearly all December we waited. Where is the snow? The few skiffs we had weren’t enough to appease the kids who wanted to sled, the sentimentalists who’d hoped for a white Christmas, or the deer hunters who needed white ground for better …
Too busy to write, with summer duties of prairie photography, watching white-tail fawns, enjoying fireworks, fishing with grandkids, cruising on the Mississippi, gardening, star-gazing . . . . you get the idea! So here’s a sample of what my camera and I have been doing these past weeks!
The turkey vultures and killdeers arrived weeks ago. The Canada goose already is on her nest on the island in the pond. Song sparrows have been singing cheerily for days. Waterfowl – ducks, geese, pelicans, coots – are funneling north along the Mississippi. Many goldfinches have turned mostly gold again, shedding their drab-green winter plumage. …
With the temperature soaring into the 60s, wave after wave of snow, blue, and white-fronted geese streamed north and northwest during the last couple of days in February, paying no heed to the human calendar. “One swallow does not make a summer,” wrote Burlington native Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, “but one skein …
Majestic pines. Pristine lakes. Rugged portages. Eagles and loons and ravens and gray jays and red-breasted nuthatches. Billion-years-old bedrock and cliffs and boulders. The satisfaction of traveling under your own power, staying dry and comfortable in a tent you pitched yourself, and eating around a campfire. A recent canoe trip to Minnesota’s 1.1-million-acre Boundary Waters …
When August gives way to September, the grandkids figure summer is over. Back to school, no more swimming or baseball. But this 70-something Grandpa welcomes the transition. Fruits and berries are maturing, nighthawks are migrating, insects abound, fall fungi and wildflowers decorate the woods, and wildlife numbers are at their peak following the breeding season. …
Maybe it was those April showers that unleashed the headlong rush into the delights of spring. Before we knew it, the early hepaticas and spring beauties gave way to toothwort and anemonella and May apples and the emerging shoots of young oaks and maples and Virginia creeper. Thickets of wild plums burst into fragrant bloom …