L ast week I reported finding a hawk’s nest. Or maybe an eagle’s nest; I had not been close enough with the camera I had in hand to get a good enough look.
Category: Environment
Searching for nothing in particular
I met a hiker on the Appalachian Trail Sunday. Actually, he was on the AT. He had been on the trail since Binghamton, NY, heading for a family gathering in Tennessee. I was on a woods road that crossed it.
Go outside and play
A male Northern Cardinal is snacking at the window feeder. It’s fun watching him chase off the House Sparrows. I dislike them, strongly, for the way they force every other species away. They don’t, mostly, actively attack interlopers. Mostly, they just crowd out any species that isn’t House Sparrow.
Geese another indicator of warming environment
I’m looking out my window at a killer snowstorm. Snowmageddon, it was supposed to be. The governor has declared a state of emergency for a large portion of the state, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike has banned several types of trailer-trucks.
Continue reading Geese another indicator of warming environment
Land of Opportunity
A deputy sheriff straps on a gun, pins his badge over his shirt pocket, and goes on patrol. Probably, he will return home to his family. Millions of law enforcement officers do the same thing every day.
Are you a hunter?
Sometimes the world seems small, and getting smaller. A young woman sat on her front step watching the baby play. I stopped to say hello. During our chat, we discovered she and her fiancé had been to visit a friend of hers and his in a state where I once lived. We chatted awhile.
Virtual Exercise
For the past few days, I have been full-on exercising. Virtually exercising, of course, in the tradition of 2018 electronic reality, as I watched young people compete in the World Series of exercising, the 2018 Winter Olympics.
How cold was it?
It snowed a couple nights ago. Road crews were out trying to make the roads unslippery. I met a former co-worker grocery shopping and mentioned I hadn’t yet pulled out my snowthrower or even a snow shovel. Where he lives, he said, a borough ordinance requires him to shovel snow – even when the wind would blow it away quicker and cleaner – from his sidewalk.
The confluence of birthrate and technology
IA teenage girl pulls out her smartphone, and flicks her finger a few times at the screen. A message flashes in a thought bubble to let her know her crescent and chai tea have been paid.
Winters passed and future
I have not yet pulled out my snowthrower. Foolishly, perhaps, I am counting on the Allegheny Mountains to keep from my door the 102 inches already dumped on Erie and other parts to my north and east.
Space: the limitless frontier
Sometimes I like to simply sit still and try not to move – to look up into space and ponder the stars.
You had to be there
I would like to visit North Korea. I would like to learn what wildlife calls the place home, and maybe why.
Some of the best tastes are junk food
When are Buffalo Wings not Buffalo wings?
Giving thanks for change
As I write this note, my vegan granddaughter is preparing the Thanksgiving feast. As you read this note, we will have experienced and graded what promises to be an interesting culinary experience. Vegans, for the uninitiated, do not eat anything that is of or from a blooded animal, which means no milk or butter in addition to no meat. I’m going to miss the turkey.
So quit already. Uh huh.
Come spring, She Who Must Be Loved will have been making it easy staying away from tobacco for 17 years. Add the year we were dating, and I haven’t had a nicotine fix in nearly 18 years. Way less than that, though, since I’ve thought about it. Not seriously, but still …
Seasons
It’s chilly outside. Colors are at peak — maybe a bit past, depending on where one looks. A damp cutting breeze is trimming leaves into great clouds of kaleidoscopic flakes onto earthen carpets where, except in the ‘burbs, they will become fertilizer for next years’ growth rings on the trees from which they fall.
Red maples, yellow poplars. Across the pasture over which Pickett’s Charge took place, Little Round Top wears horizontal stripes where different species have chosen different growing areas.
Forests, multi-purpose rooms on the mountain
I walked in a portion of Michaux State Forest a few days ago. Splashes of white paint brushed onto trees along the trail were spaced out so one could stand at one and very nearly see the next one. The path was littered in alternating sections of oak leaves and pine needles. Here and there a few birds flittered through the branches, difficult to identify in the breaking darkness. A solitary squirrel scrambled through a long-needle pine.
I was raised in logging country. I’ve cut trees and twitched them out to staging areas where they were loaded on trucks to be hauled to the paper mill.
Continue reading Forests, multi-purpose rooms on the mountain
Sexual assault: culturally secret bullying
The past few weeks of television coverage of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual proclivities likely will not do much to ameliorate the situation. It’s not like we have not been discussing how poorly some men treat women.
We love to see rich folks get their come-uppance. Weinstein has paid out millions of dollars to ensure his victims’ silence. We have watched with interest every time Bill Cosby’s name has crossed our electronic screen; he, too has “settled,” paying an accuser to forget anything happened. Bill O’Reilly has several times “settled” with accusers — the latest settlement was for $32 million — and then denied that anything happened. And multiple times each week — sometimes it seems almost daily — our local newspaper carries the story of someone who has abused women or children, or both. Mostly those passing through Adams County courts on their way the front page are men. Mostly, they don’t have the money of a Bill Cosby, or a Bill O’Reilly, or a Harvey Weinstein with which to pay off an accuser.
The most graceful bird
An eagle is majestic, beautifully decorated, lord of all he surveys. He is not always hunting, but even when he is not, he is cataloging possibilities against the time when he desires a snack.
Wild turkeys are utilitarian. Ben Franklin, according to a 2013 article in Smithsonian Magazine, wrote in a letter to his daughter he thought the wild turkey “a true original Native of America … a little vain and silly (but nonetheless) a bird of courage.” Some have thought the wild turkey flightless, but they err. On the other hand, it flies only when it must, and then only for short distances.
The soothing sound of silence
Rows of waves crash in thunderous cadence onto the rocks outside my bedroom window. Some 15 miles to the southeast, the Monhegan Island light blinks its warning to passing vessels: “The rock on which I stand has been here billions of years, and likely will be here billions more,” the lighthouse flashes. “Pass with care.”
Winters can be frigidly unforgiving. A young couple who had gone to town one winter day spent longer away than planned. If one is accustomed to living in a winter wood, one knows how to “bank” a fire so it will burn all day, slowly, to keep the house from freezing. But the hour had become late, and the fire expired, leaving the cabin turned cold enough to freeze stuff.