Month: April 2017
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Where Insects Fear to Tread
There is no exquisite beauty …without some strangeness. ~Edgar Allan Poe Part two of our quest for carnivorous plants took us first to the Green Swamp, a well-known NC Nature Conservancy preserve site in Brunswick and Columbus counties. It was getting late in the day, so we went straight to the main access point, a… Read more…
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Bay Watch
Find one, and you’ll find yourself closer to the heart of what a Carolina Bay can be: an island of wildness in a world largely tamed, a few acres of the primeval past passed over by progress. ~T. Edward Nickens The North Carolina Botanical Garden has an exquisite collection of carnivorous plants, and they are… Read more…
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Catching Gnats and Plucking Lichens
More than with most species of small birds, the attention and interest of the observer center about the nesting habits of the blue-gray gnatcatcher because of the great beauty of its nest. ~Francis Marion Weston, 1949 One of my favorite spring arrivals is the plucky little blue-gray gnatcatcher. It is tiny, but bold. It looks… Read more…
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Unfurling
Only spread a fern frond over a man’s head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in. ~John Muir Before there is a fern frond, there is a fiddlehead. The curled tip of an unfurling fern frond resembles the curled ornamentation (called a scroll) on the end of a… Read more…
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Swarming Season
The happiness of the bee and the dolphin is to exist. For man it is to know that and to wonder at it. ~Jacques Yves Cousteau Just at closing one day this week, a coworker at the Garden sent an email alerting everyone to a swarm of honeybees just outside the back gate. I was… Read more…
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The Spirit of Spring
April hath put a spirit of youth in everything. ~William Shakespeare Things have been so busy at work that I have failed miserably at getting outside with camera in hand to document some of the beauty around me. I made amends Saturday afternoon, and spent a few hours just wandering around the yard, observing and… Read more…
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Roads End Naturalist 