Celestial deception
June 30, 2015 - Tonight marks the closest encounter in this summer's epic Venus-Jupiter Great Conjunction, and the two planets—Venus is...
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Engineered freedom
June 29, 2015 - After years of never seeing Eyed Click Beetles, I've now, over the past two years, been spotting them regularly, both in...
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Discovering Timothy
June 28, 2015 - My partner in ambulatory crime is heading back home today, but before Stasia departed, there was time for one more walk.
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Plague's end
June 27, 2015 - It has been a pretty bad year for Gypsy Moths, and though the defoliation is spotty, there are places around here where...
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At the summit
June 26, 2015 - It was a relatively fine day for a hike, and I didn't have to do much convincing to get my nephew Lucas and my granddaug...
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Free at last
June 25, 2015 - And then there was one... one juvenile Wood Frog, that is. When Stasia and I stocked the aquarium with tadpoles last May...
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Closing in
June 24, 2015 - The much-ballyhooed conjunction of Venus, the bright "star" at the bottom right, and Jupiter, the less bright object to...
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Downhill slide
June 23, 2015 - We have a visitor this week, and that, of course, plays hob with my walk schedule... not that I'm complaining. But when...
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Pickerels commencing
June 22, 2015 - Old habits die hard, and even though my long-traveled route downhill brings me past the increasingly abominable developm...
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Lord Baltimore's butterfly
June 21, 2015 - I was asked recently to help put together a photo album for an old acquaintance whose memory is fading. The idea is that...
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They're back
June 20, 2015 - Sometimes an accident turns out for the best... and then there are the Gypsy Moths. The happy accident is this photograp...
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Two graces
June 19, 2015 - With the wheelchair, the crutch, and anything else we could think of to enable my wife to be more or less mobile, we hea...
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Beautiful newcomer
June 18, 2015 - This is a Red-spotted Purple butterfly, and one of the first of these beauties to put in an appearance. I discovered it...
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Swamp unicorn
June 17, 2015 - One of the great joys of my life as a naturalist and photojournalist is discovering, then documenting, something new. Of...
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Praise the rain and the Fuji
June 16, 2015 - We're still at least half a foot below normal in terms of precipitation for the year so far, but maybe the drought, whic...
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Welcome home
June 15, 2015 - The baby Great Blue Herons, fuzzballs only a few weeks ago, are taking on the look of gangly adolescents. They've stretc...
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Don't try this at home
June 14, 2015 - A host of newly minted dragonflies have been emerging from the water over the past week, and they all seem to have one t...
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Please release me
June 13, 2015 - The Wood froglets that I've been raising since my granddaughter and I brought home a hatchling-filled egg mass late in A...
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Dot-tailed redux
June 12, 2015 - Today was dump day, and that usually means a reward: a trek up Lantern Hill, the trailhead of which is just down the hil...
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The graduate
June 11, 2015 - My wife was still hurting from her fall. I was still exhausted from caregiving and a brutal month of deadline work. It w...
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The first fritillary
June 10, 2015 - The first bellflowers of the year have opened in the meadow across the street, and where there are campanulas, there wil...
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The next generation
June 09, 2015 - I was trekking across the athletic fields at our local high school when I saw what, at a distance, looked like a log on...
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Beautiful plague
June 08, 2015 - You know that it's almost summer—proper, astronomical summer—when the hedgerows and the edges of the fields go white and...
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Hovering
June 07, 2015 - One of these days I will, I resolve, get good, really good, with the hover flies. But that day hasn't arrived yet, and i...
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On the trail
June 06, 2015 - Most of my daily walks are done solo. It's not that I'm anti-social, it's just a matter of scheduling. Essentially, I hi...
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Dark jewel
June 05, 2015 - This is not the first of the Ebony Jewelwing damselflies to pay us a visit—they've been on the wing, the dark wing, for...
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Natural laundry
June 04, 2015 - One of the best known songs from the classic musical South Pacific features the line about washing "that man out of my h...
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Almost adult
June 03, 2015 - Blue Dasher dragonflies are common as dirt around here, and they just might be our most abundant species, with Pondhawks...
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Sweet William after rain
June 02, 2015 - The rain eased up late in the afternoon, too late for a long walk, but with a little bit of sun shining through the clou...
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Solomon's-seal, true and false
June 01, 2015 - Something amazing happened overnight: after the US Drought Monitor had tipped our region quickly into the Moderate Droug...
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