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Feather, Light, and Air
Did you know there’s a whole volume of chickadee poems? I’m apparently one of many fans of this cheerful, talkative, hardy, round little acrobat. Anna Botsford Comstock points out that the winter birds…
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Making the most of the sun
Today promises to be rainy around here, but yesterday was sunny. We capitalized on it by taking two walks, each to a different preserve. The first was a marsh about 5 minutes from…
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Exhaustless entertainment
The fields and woods about one are a book from which he may draw exhaustless entertainment, if he will. (John Burroughs, from the essay “A Sharp Lookout”) Today, the girls and I took…
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Apple-Picking
Yesterday was another overcast, austere day here. We drove to a mountaintop orchard and picked apples in chilly, upper-40’s temperatures. The landscape has begun to look merely rusty to me — as it…
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Leaf love
The girls and I went for a walk (in their case, a run) last week looking for leaves to sketch for our inaugural leaf study. As with most topics in nature study, this…
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Nature Notes: Recent Birds
Here are some new-to-us birds we’ve seen lately. I snapped this photo in the back yard. “It looks like a catbird, but brown,” I mused. My ten-year-old came to look at the picture.…
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Hummingbird Art
We’re fond of hummingbirds around here. As I mentioned in this post, the sight of them is not uncommon, but it invariably makes us blurt in sudden stage whispers, “Sh! Hummer!” Then we…
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Milkweed Adventures
Today, we went searching for monarch caterpillars. It’s been several years since we’ve been able to observe the metamorphosis, and I’ve had a hankering to do it again. Unfortunately, we found not a…
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Read Aloud Thursday: Burgess Bird Book
It’s no secret around these parts that we’ve been bird watching all summer. Thornton Burgess’s books have been a nice fit as read-alouds, and recent titles have included The Adventures of Mr Mocker…
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Longlegs the Heron
We’ve been reading and enjoying Thornton Burgess’s Longlegs the Heron. A friend loaned us a copy of this difficult-to-find book after reading this post, and as food for our ongoing heron interest it…
