The yard tells me different things now than it did a decade ago, and I have been trying to put my finger on the difference. The birds are mostly the same. The trees are mostly the same. The structure of the year is mostly...
I took a long weekend on a lake without a plan. This is something I had not done in a year or two and it turned out to be exactly what I needed and I want to recommend it carefully, because the trip works...
The middle of May is, in the part of the country I live in, the rough midpoint of the year by feel if not by calendar. Spring is fully in. The leaves have come out. The migrants are mostly through. The summer birds are...
I have been drinking the first coffee of the morning on the back step, not in the kitchen and not in the chair by the window, but on the step itself, which is concrete and slightly cold and faces east. The change is small....
The first hummingbird of the year showed up at the feeder at 6:18 in the evening on a Sunday in early May. I had put the feeder out a week earlier, on the conservative side of the arrival window, and had checked it every...
The wrens picked the hose reel. This is not a thing I would have predicted, in part because the hose reel is one of the few human-made objects in the yard I use regularly, and in part because there are at least three nest...
The Gulf Coast in early May is a place where two migrations meet. The trans-Gulf migrants are coming off the water, having flown across the entire Gulf of Mexico in a single night, and the shorebirds along the beach are passing through on their...
The porch came back this week. I do not mean the structure, which has been there all winter, but the use of it. The first morning warm enough to take coffee outside happened on Saturday, and I have been on the porch for at...
The first warbler wave of the spring came through the back hedge on a Friday morning in mid-April. I was at the kitchen window watching the feeder, half-paying attention to the cardinals, when a flash of yellow at the edge of my vision pulled...
The Driftless backroads in April are some of the best driving in the country and almost no one knows them. The hills are still bare enough to read the geology, the streams are full from snowmelt, and the small towns along the bottom roads...