Drought in the fall or winter can be a subtle thing, a farmer once told me. The landscape then is typically brown. Without crops, gardens and lawns withering in the heat, the idea of a drought may not cross your mind. But let it cross your mind now, because...
Regardless of how you pronounce it, my tomato plants have been beyond prolific so far this summer. In the last seven days, I’ve eaten somewhere around 23 tomatoes and given away more than that. I feel a bit like Cool Hand Luke. (Nobody could eat 50 eggs.) There are...
The largest member of the crow family, the subject of an Edgar Allan Poe poem and a good Halloween decoration, ravens seem to be more and more numerous lately. I’ve spotted them in Minnewaska State Park Preserve, a place of high, forested ridges where you would expect to see...
During the past few days, I’ve spotted the following dead animals on some of the Hudson Valley’s roads: fox, rabbit, opossum, woodchuck and deer, both young and old. Save for the deer, I’m assuming the other dead animals caused almost no delay or damage for whoever was behind the...
It’s apparently a snake-eat-snake world in my yard. I stumbled upon this tangle of snakes recently and it turned out to be a milk snake eating a garter snake. The milk snake took at least two hours to consume his fellow reptile. That was the amount of time that...
There are no anvils or giant piles of birdseed involved, but if you need tips on how to avoid coyotes, the state Department of environmental Conservation has you covered. As the temperatures warm up and spring gets underway, the wild canines are on the move, the state warns, and...
Did you know hummingbirds consume half their weight in nectar and insects each day, stoking the furnace that enables them to beat their wings 90 times each second? Tired? The tiny birds have been on the move for a few weeks now as this map of Ruby-throated hummingbird migration...
Red-winged blackbirds and killdeer (along with the phoebes that nest in our yard) are some of the surer signs of spring. (Robins not so much.) Another sign that spring is upon us is the annual bear-hunting report from the state Department of Environmental Conservation. The agency recaps the previous...