I know you are not supposed to click your own Google AdSense ads, but recently there were two ads for purveyors of bird’s nest soup, and I had to go see what that was all about. I knew that bird’s…
Natural history
A favorite native plant in my wildflower garden is twinleaf, Jeffersonia diphylla. The flowers are similar to that of bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, which I also have spreading all over nearby. But you can see where twinleaf gets both its common…
I’ve written before about Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis), a common little sparrow throughout much of North America. This species generally breeds at high latitudes (e.g., across Canada), or further south at higher altitudes (usually over 1500 feet/460 m). There it…
This week I’ve been trying to finish up some especially obnoxious paperwork on a project before my field season begins in earnest. Since I’m annoyed, I thought I’d take a little break and write about an annoying creature: the earwig….
There are only two families of birds found just in the West Indies. One is the Dulidae, consisting of one species, the Palmchat (Dulus dominicus) of Hispanolia. The other is the Todidae, or todies, of which there are five species….
Nearly every field guide to trees that I’ve seen lists carvings on the trunks of American Beech trees (Fagus grandifolia) as a field mark. In my urban area, virtually every beech tree is inscribed with carved initials and declarations of…
I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about millipedes, even though there are an estimated 80,000 species on earth (only 10,000 named), with about 1,400 in the U.S. As a gardener and someone who is fond of peeking under…
Over the weekend, an Ivory Gull (Pagophila eburnea) was found near Point Pelee, Ontario. The sighting of one of these birds in the United States always creates a sensation, because it is a bird of the high Arctic, and fewer…
crisp brown leaf, wind-blown flake of bark, falling from tree nope, wrong: brown creeper The diminutive Brown Creeper (Certhia americana) is notorious for being unobtrusive. Even the creeper’s sweet, clear, musical song can be frustratingly difficult to hear due to…
This past week I participated in one of several Christmas Bird Counts that I do annually. I’ve done counts here in Michigan on sunny, cloudy, snowy, rainy, raw, and balmy days, but never on a day that included all of…