Photo shared by reader, Maureen Sharib  Halloween has taken over yards and department stores in full force. It’s a rare drive now to anywhere these days where you don’t pass under the looming shadow of a 15-foot-tall skeleton or inflatable monster of some kind. While the fake bones abound, you might be walking across the…

 There’s a reason for falling leaves. It might look like the colorful beginning of the end (winter) to many, but like the three other seasons in Ohio, fall is just a necessary transition to the next. If spring is the “growing” season, fall is more than just harvest season; it’s the “replenishing” season. That means…

 If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I’ll sort of paraphrase for wildlife … if the food you need isn’t in the kitchen, find another kitchen. Or if you or your preferred food can’t stand the cold, head south if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere. For eons, that’s exactly what animals…

Quick — can you name the official native fruit tree of Ohio? If you thought of Johnny Appleseed and said the “apple” you’re wrong, If you thought Buckeye, wrong again. That’s Ohio’s “official tree” and hopefully you know not to eat the nuts. The answer is the Pawpaw. It’s indigenous to Ohio, has existed globally…

  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…

  While the volume of annual cicadas is slowly fading during the day, the 33 reported different species of crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids are ready to keep the concert rolling into late summer and fall. I’m sure that there are a lot of people who just lump all of the species producing the seemingly continuous…

When the band America sang in the song A Horse with No Name,  “The ocean is a desert with its life underground, And a perfect disguise above,” they were somewhat right about rivers. Maybe. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but there’s a lot of life that goes unseen and disguised beneath the water’s…

 I’m known to say, “I’ll do cold. And I’ll do wet. But I don’t do cold AND wet.” While that hasn’t historically held 100% true, it has for sure put a nix on my duck hunting to date. That and my inability to sit still or wanting to force or watch a dog be still…

The golden days of summer mean different things to people. Maybe it’s nostalgic mornings of soccer practice or evenings relaxing on the porch. Maybe it’s the rush of the last slow days before fall activities kick in. Maybe it’s the earlier sunsets and rising sun. Or maybe it’s just the literal color that seems to…