Bold blue and yellow flowers, as well as delicate pink and purple, peeked through brown grass. South Florida’s native blueberry offered small but luscious fruits. Young, new leaves promised renewal of a cowhorn orchid that was thought to have been lost to the previous year’s wildfire....
I wanted to visit Dry Tortugas National Park long before I understood what or where it was. It sounded exciting - a tropical island far removed from the rest of the Florida Keys and an oasis for marine and bird life. It sounded like my...
Our goal was to see 100 bird species in and around Everglades National Park by the end of the day - The Fifth Everglades Century Day by a core team of Floridians and Marylanders. We’d succeeded on our last venture, eking out a couple of...
Rhode Island Reds? Golden Comet hybrids? Who knows! The two hardly distinguishable chickens I call the Henriettas are Amish mutts of the hen world, but they generally lay an egg a day (or at least did before days got short) and are entertaining; so does...
I’m not sure what caused me to glance up at that moment, nor how I noticed the writhing gray amidst the foliage but it stopped me in my tracks. I watched as tiny wings coated in fluff beat vigorously, but the bird went nowhere. Talons...
“New” seems to be a relative term in England and in the case of the New Forest, “new” dates back to 1079 when newly arrived William the Conqueror designated the land as a royal forest for his deer hunts. As a non-Brit, 1079 sounded ancient...
Pineland gave way to rolling dunes, dunes so expansive that the ocean beyond went nearly forgotten. It was low tide and the waves were so far out that there were no crashing sounds to remind me I was seaside. Burrows riddled the hillside and I...
Titchwell, I was told by the pair of local birders I’d met while watching spoonbill courtship (see my previous blog), was THE place to ‘twitch’ (birdwatch) along the Norfolk Coast. Given the parking lot was filled with people carrying binoculars and spotting scopes, it was...
Marsh Harrier in flight. A pile of whipped cream and strawberries sat before me as word rippled through lunch at the lovely Victoria Inn restaurant that a pair of Eurasian spoonbills was courting at one of the neighboring bird blinds. I shoveled my ‘Eton Mess’ into...
Oystercatchers Mud flats stretched before me for what seemed like miles. Waves lapped at one far off edge, but seemed too distant to threaten the clusters of water birds milling about. I pulled my hood tight against the nipping winds and stared at the ground as...