Photo: Johns Hopkins University Press Book Announcement: Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Virginia Congratulations, Paul E. Bugas, Jr.! In Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of Virginia, the foremost experts on Commonwealth fishes bring their decades of field experience to readers, offering a complete reference to the fishes of the entire state of Virginia. Gathering…
By Cheryl Shull, Cohort V During a recent fishing trip at Elkhorn Lake, my husband and I observed what we believed to be a brown water snake swimming towards us. As I began shooting photos, we quickly realized that we had a timber rattlesnake in our midst. We enjoyed the afternoon watching the snake quietly…
Pollinator Gardeners, expand your plant lists to include Pussy Willows. So much effort has gone into making pollinator gardens to benefit the Monarch butterflies that migrate through our area every year. And rightly so. All pollinators benefit from restoring even just a small amount of habitat. I want to talk to you about a butterfly…
Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors Set in the Gila Wilderness, this book seemed to be an appropriate read while I was on the road for my November adventure in New Mexico and Arizona. Connors, a copy editor for the Wall Street Journal, leaves his existence of a concrete city…
Headwaters Master Naturalist RareQuest Team 2 (Ginny Hoffman, Elaine Smith, and Chip Brown) conducted their final outing for the season on September 25th to search for Quercus macrocarpa (bur oak) in Rockingham county. To get an idea of what they were looking for Elaine suggested they make a stop at a known specimen found in…
H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald Spiraling in a tail spin with the loss of her father, MacDonald, a seasoned falconer, acquires a goshawk, a notoriously difficult predator to train with the notion it will help her to disappear into another world and momentarily forget about her loss, her grief. Part memoir, part natural…
Not all of the figures and data are in but as of February 25th, checklists that have been submitted surpassed 158,000 and 5,500 species were reported, topping 50% of the world’s birds from more than 130 countries. The collective spirit of such an event provides an impressive weekend of tallying birds around the world. The…
