My nest box brings all the birds to the yard

“I know something you don’t know,” isn’t the gleeful greeting you expect from someone well past elementary school, never mind retirement. And in reality, there are a lot of things I don’t know and I expect that everyone knows things that I don’t. But it didn’t bother me because it was too big a secret…

  We pushed prairie chickens out of the way and to the west. We were too late for the passenger pigeon. We overlooked the Carolina parakeet. Everybody got it wrong with the Heath Hen. But by the 1940s and 50s, we started to figure things out. And boy, did we knock it out of the…

A blanket of snow. Today, most people hear the phrase and think of it only as a visual metaphor, if they think of it at all. Snow covers everything; it looks like a blanket, end of story. What’s really happening is much more than a visually blanketing; it’s a literal blanket. And it’s not just…

Many people move around the landscape and just see cars, people, and signs of places to surrender their legal tender. Unless there is a snow-covered mountain peak, palm trees by a white-sand beach, or a herd of bison charging through the snow, they’re bored. They think nothing is happening. I feel bad for those people….

Years ago, (let’s say late 1990’s) I was taking an early spring morning walk on the edge of a fenceline with my German Shorthaired Pointer, Eva. When a coyote popped out in front of us, maybe 60 yards from me and 30 yards from Eva, I wasn’t sure what to expect: Eva had never took…