The big cicada event this year began and was over again before we even got to the Fourth of July. But the annual cicadas are back, just like they always are, singing from the trees. While the 17-year cicadas come in extremely large numbers – that’s kind of their whole thing – the annual cicadas […]
Nature
Before you read on, we are pleased and thrilled and absolutely overjoyed to introduce New Person of LWON, Eric Wagner! Eric is a fabulous writer and chaser of birds based in Seattle, Washington, who has written for the likes of The Atlantic, High Country News, Audubon, and Orion. He has penned magazine articles about techy […]
It’s fig season again! This post first ran in October 2019. Now we have a squirrel who I’m competing with to get the ripe ones off our bigger tree. And our little tree? It’s still little, with about six figs and two leafy branches. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the branches seem a little stronger […]
You know I love the 17-year cicadas. I loved when the nymphs were crawling out of the ground. I loved when the adults were blundering about. I loved the wings littered on the ground. I loved the singing from the trees. Now I love seeing the flagging on trees, the latest reminder of the cicadas’ […]
A butterfly in my kitchen—that’s a surprise. It would have had to flutter up a lot of stairs and down a lot of hallways to get here from outside. I suspect it actually came in with some kale. I think it’s a cabbage white butterfly, a sweet little agricultural pest that arrived on this side […]
Earlier this summer I went on a bee hunt. I’m talking about native bees, not honeybees. In the words of Sam Droege, the guy leading the bee hunt, “If your model of ‘bee’ is the honeybee, you need to forget nearly everything you know about bees.” Droege works at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and […]
This week, at a lake house in Michigan, I kept hearing a sound that made me think of a gull, but wasn’t. At least, I heard it when I didn’t see any gulls. I’d heard that the Merlin bird identification app can now identify birds by sound. So I held my phone up and it […]
We first saw the elk in September. Our route to the Wilder forest passed the Yaquina Bay, and there, between the road and mudflats, was an antler rack we initially mistook for a willow tree. Our neighbor said it was likely that hunters chased them out of the hills. That they were a smart herd. […]