This time of year, as winter settles in, nature can seem quiet, even boring. Most plants have shed their leaves and gone dormant and much of the fauna have migrated south or hunkered down for a long winter’s nap.
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Wild Ideas nature column
Wild Ideas: Winter settles in?
Wild Ideas: Making mole hills in the mountains
While bunnies, bears, mice and myriad other animals were main characters in my childhood storybooks, only the “Wind in the Willows” featured the lowly mole. That just fed my curiosity about this mysterious animal, so one day I followed a mole tunnel and dug up its engineer. The creature looked like no other I’d...
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Wild Ideas: The romance of cloudspotting
“Clouds are Nature’s poetry spoken in a whisper in the rarefied air between crest and crag….Nothing in nature rivals their variety and drama; nothing matches their sublime, ephemeral beauty. “ —Gavin Pretor-Pinney in “The Cloudspotter’s Guide” Mare’s tail, mammatus, thundercloud—evocative names for clouds, actors playing out a drama over our heads we often ignore...
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Wild Ideas: The grapes of repast
Winter keeps coming in fits and starts, and our migratory birds here in the Blue Ridge seem in no rush to keep moving south. Some of these lagging migrants have been taking advantage of a late-fruiting vine that’s festooning the crown of a small tree near my house. A couple of cedar waxwings – one...
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Wild Ideas: Indian summer brings out the critters
We’re not the only ones who enjoy Indian summer. Animals that seemed to have gone into hibernation suddenly pop up everywhere, taking advantage of another chance to put on fat before winter really sets in.
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Wild Ideas: Identifying fungi, way more fun than eating them
I knew as a kid that toads didn’t actually sit on toadstools (hookah-smoking caterpillars did that), although I did seem to find an awful lot of toadlets sitting under the umbrella tops of some mushrooms. Maybe they were feeding on insects that were eating the mushrooms, or maybe they were seeking shelter from weather...
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Wild Ideas: Virginia’s Little Switzerland
A fall visit to Highland County, Virginia's "Little Switzerland," much of which lies in George Washington National Forest.
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Wild Ideas: Different day, different web
The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web. – Edwin Way Teale, American naturalist, photographer, and writer Spiders are arthropods in the arachnid (Arachnida) class, named for the Greek mythological character Arachne. According to the myth, as related in John Compton’s “The Life of...
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Wild Ideas: A young opossum rescue
Driving out of my hollow recently on a brutally hot, humid morning, I saw a woman with her dog at the side of the road and an opossum dead in the middle of it. The woman seemed distressed, so I stopped to see if she needed help. She told me the opossum had babies...
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Wild Ideas: Mushroom, miracle or merkle — the hunt is on!
Merkel, murkle, morel ― a Morchellaby any other name would smell as funky. It’s that time of year when passionate Appalachian “shroomers” go a-huntin’ for this wrinkled “aristocrat of the forest,” as Czarnecki describes it.
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Wild Ideas: Name that tune
The vernal equinox did not disappoint in officially kicking off spring this year. I woke that fine day to the welcome if monotonous sound of my eastern phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) signaling their return -- at least this is probably the same pair as last year, since they’re loyal to their nesting sites.
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Wild Ideas: When pruning, use the skills of a barber
“Off with their heads” is not a good idea when pruning.
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Wild Ideas: Spring? Okay, found it.
I don’t care what the calendar says, here in the western Piedmont, spring begins March 1. This year, however, the winter was cold, dry and windy, and seemed endless.
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Wild Ideas: The woodcock’s high-courting ways
A lot of bird species have what we humans consider bizarre courtship displays (although I think Homo sapiens could easily beat them in that department). In Virginia, the strangest belongs to the American Woodcock (Scolopax minor). Belonging to the shorebird (Charadriiformes) taxonomic order, S. minor is the only woodcock native to North America. It...
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Wild Ideas: Tracking more than footprints
When I was a kid, I fancied myself to be a great tracker. When I was roaming the forests and meadows near my suburban home, I imagined I was a Native American, since we kids learned from Westerns that they were the best trackers. The goal was to find and observe animals, and ultimately...
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Wild Ideas: Quacking frogs get a jump on spring
Even as a kid, I was an avid frog watcher. Even before the Spring Peepers’ chorus heralded the arrival of spring, I’d pull on my boots and go to still-icy pools to listen for the sound of Lithobates sylvaticus, the Wood Frog, kicking off the annual frog-breeding cycle. The Wood Frog, a forest dweller,...
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Wild Ideas: The tactile masked bandit
The North American Raccoon (Procyon lotor) is smart, curious, bold, omnivorous, and opportunistic -- like a small bear in a mask. Our relationship with them has been a conflicted one. We’ve been captivated by the raccoon’s antics, confounded by some of its behavior and annoyed at its skillful thievery. Not only have we captured...
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Wild Ideas: An old friend, back in the twilight
A recent question about the name of my company, Nighthawk Communications, brought to mind hot summer nights in Wyoming and one warm, damp spring evening here in Rappahannock County. That evening in Rappahannock, as I was walking my dog through a meadow where I lived, I saw a vague silhouette careening through the sky...
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Wild Ideas: For memories, nothing eclipses a full moon
I’m not one to sit out in the cold, especially at night, but I made an exception for last month’s lunar eclipse. The last time the lunar eclipse coincided with the winter solstice, in 1648, Gallileo “was languishing under house arrest for suggesting the Earth circled the sun,” as Slate magazine put it, so...
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Wild Ideas: Daddy longlegs, crawly but maybe not so creepy
Some people fear spiders in general — or are just sure that venomous Brown Recluse or Black Widow spiders are lurking in the dark corners of our houses waiting to pounce on us. The truth is that neither of these species is common in our houses and the arachnids that are more likely to...
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Wild Ideas: Things that go screech . . .
I’m really not a winter person. As the days get shorter, the nights longer, and the temperature drops, all I want to do is hibernate. I like to be lulled to sleep by a full chorus of cicadas, crickets, tree frogs, and the occasional whip-poor-will, so I find the winter nocturnal silence, with the...
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Wild Ideas: Green treasures on the winter forest floor
As the leaves have fallen off, the green wall of oak-hickory forest behind my house has given way to glimpses of mountains and valleys to the south and west. With the lush green of summer and the brilliant fall colors now a memory, any spot of green left tends to beckon me when I...
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Wild Ideas: What’s best in winter for wild birds, and for you
You like birds. You want to see them up close. You’d like to help them survive through the winter. For any or all of these reasons, you’ve decided to feed your wild feathered neighbors, but doing it so that you and the birds get the most out of it can be complicated.
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Wild Ideas: A rafter of turkeys
Say “turkey” and most people conjure up the image of the cooked bird that graces holiday tables. Others think of the magnificent fowl roaming our forests. A rafter of wild turkeys regularly forages through the woods around my house. Nope, I don’t mean I have a large wooden beam in the woods with turkeys...
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Wild Ideas: A mouse in the house
It’s that time of year. The days are getting shorter and colder, and in the face of oncoming winter, most of us start thinking about being warm in our abodes with plenty of food at hand. We’re not alone in our thinking. Or in our houses. That pitter-patter of little feet and gnawing at...
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Wild Ideas: Is that a rufous hummingbird at your feeder?
A lot of us in Virginia enjoy feeding hummingbirds, putting our nectar feeders out in the spring at the first sign of their arrival, and taking them in after the last hummer disappears for its long trek south in the fall. While at my brothers’ in Southeast Alaska this fall, we were watching rufous...
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Wild Ideas: Life on the deck
When you live in a rural county in Virginia, you don’t have to go far to see wildlife. The numerous critters on my back deck and within view in the forest beyond have offered me endless hours of wildlife viewing this year. When I moved to the house on Aaron Mountain in February, I...
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Wild Ideas: The sky is falling
Except for poison ivy, thorny vines and the occasional venomous rattlesnake, the Virginia Piedmont forest is usually not too hazardous. This autumn, however, danger has been raining down from above. The instigators are trees, releasing acorns and nuts — a bumper “hard mast” crop, by early estimates. Mast is the fruit (with seed inside)...
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