Roads End Naturalist

Exploring the natural world as we wander at the end of the road


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  • Opossum Afterlife

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    Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides. ~Lao Tzu One day earlier this month I discovered a recently deceased Virginia Opossum out by one of the wood piles. No idea what might have happened to it though it was not long after some severely cold weather. I decided to… Read more

  • Mustelid Moments

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    We need the tonic of wildness, — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. ~Henry David… Read more

  • Sharing with Friends

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    To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake it is necessary to stand in the cold. ~Aristotle This is the second post from our January trip to Yellowstone. After spending a few days scouting the northern range of the park and hanging out with some Montana friends, a group of eight NC friends flew out to… Read more

  • A Winter’s Journey

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    Winter is not a season, it’s a celebration. ~Anamika Mishra Melissa had another wonderful educator workshop to Yellowstone last month with plenty of extraordinary sightings including a Pygmy Owl, Ermine, and a Bobcat feeding on a Mule Deer carcass (jealous, me??). We planned for her to take some time off afterward and have some friends… Read more

  • The Forest Unseen

    Forests will always hold your secrets, for that’s what forests are for. ~Victoria Erickson We’ve been gone for a couple of weeks (more on that adventure in the next post) and the trail cameras were busy keeping up with the goings-on back home while we were away. Lots of the same sort of behaviors we… Read more

  • Critter Condo

    Be as useful as a tree! Give life to others; be shelter to everyone; grant fruits to all! Be good like a tree! ~Mehmet Murat Ildan Just beyond our deer fence is a huge old Tulip Poplar with a split at the base forming a hollow that stretches up 20 feet or so. This is… Read more

  • A New Year, and New Happenings in the Woods

    Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn and you will. ~Vernon Howard The first days of the new year have brought a few more surprises and lessons from the trail cameras scattered in our woods. Several cameras have remained in one spot for many months because they tend to record… Read more

  • Wrapping It Up In Our Woods

    Departure of a year welcomes so many new memories. ~Munia Khan Our woods offer a lot of things to us – a quiet soundscape, a canopy of huge trees that help cool our landscape in summer, majestic gray forms that stretch to the winter sky, and a source of nourishment and shelter for the countless… Read more

  • What’s in a Name?

    It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. ~Oscar Wilde I enjoy cold winter days as I tend to pay more attention to the little things in our woods like patterns, surprise colors, and living things that I sometimes pay less attention to in warmer months… Read more

  • Ice Art

    Ice has a social life. Its changeability shapes the culture, language and stories of those who live near it! ~Robert Macfarlane I went for a walk in our cold woods on Monday and came across some remnant ice patterns left from a combination of heavy rain followed by frigid temperatures while we were away for… Read more

Roads End Naturalist

Exploring the natural world as we wander at the end of the road

Copyright Mike Dunn and Melissa Dowland