Apologies to anyone who recently visited my blogs posted between January and March 2013 and found the pictures were missing. This was a widespread problem affecting WordPress bloggers, but the images have now been reloaded. *********************************** A large black-and-white bird
If the Ancient Greeks ever had a deity for protecting the environment it was Artemis. She was a goddess of the forests and wilderness, a defender of the vulnerable who once hid in a chestnut tree from Zeus when he
Of all the things I remember about being in Boy Scouts, the stories told by Akela, our scout leader, about how to survive in the wilderness have stayed with me over the years. Suburban London children didn’t need to know
Dogs get really close when they want to check something out. Noses twitch and nares gape when air is being drawn from an object of curiosity across their olfactory epithelium, which can sense far more odors than we can ever
Few people are star-struck these days—unless you mean a movie- or rock-star. How could they be when the nightly spectacle is veiled by light pollution? That expression might strike you as perverse, even as a non sequitur, for isn’t “light”
Old Cyrus thought he had killed off the scythe for good when he invented the mechanical reaper. The scythe has mowed hay for fodder and harvested grain for bread since the Roman Empire, and its diminutive cousin, the sickle, was
Peel back the soft green cover, and you might find menace skulking in a Virginia garden. A neighbor picked up a copperhead by its tail, which turned round to bite him (can you blame it?). Large wolf spiders enjoy nipping
Colonial Williamsburg staff in 18th Century garb draw your eye and a fife and drum band may turn your ear, but never on a Saturday morning when a farmer’s market takes over Duke of Gloucester Street. The ancient street is
Dear Jean I couldn’t leave my students to say farewell. Our friends told me it was one of those miserable days before the daffodils bloom along the Cambridge College Backs: Scots would call it a “dreich day”. Pronounced correctly, everyone
Biological mysteries always drew me in, so it was natural to choose a career in research with the egg as its main subject. Remember the mythological sphinx with a human head and a lion’s body in Ancient Egypt? It guarded
The first picture of a baby is usually in the mother’s arms soon after delivery, and becomes pasted into an album for posterity. My mother missed out on that snapshot since I was born in austere post-war London when a
The first time we met Bertie she was sitting behind bottles of apple butter and pickled vegetables laid out on a wooden table in the green outside Sharp’s Store in West Virginia. The bottles were lined up in serried ranks,