Roads End Naturalist

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


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  • Awesome Arachnids

    She asks me to kill the spider. Instead, I get the most peaceful weapons I can find. I take a cup and a napkin. I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away. If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, just being alive and not… Read more

  • Hiking the High Country

    Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. ~Harold B Melchart Seems like just a little over a week ago that I was struggling to climb a mountain… Read more

  • Shining Rock

    Backpacking: An extended form of hiking in which people carry double the amount of gear they need for half the distance they planned to go in twice the time it should take. ~Author unknown Melissa loves to backpack. That is an understatement. And I love to be in the places that backpacking takes us. It… Read more

  • See No Weevil…Well, Just One

    A big nose never spoiled a handsome face. ~French proverb I set out the moth light the other night and had a few species come in, but had many non-moth visitors – katydids, a praying mantis, lots of caddisflies, and one very interesting little guy, a weevil. Weevils are the largest family of beetles with… Read more

  • Snippets

    Life moves pretty fast.If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. ~John Hughes Indeed, life has been moving too fast of late, with so many things happening at work and in our personal lives. Luckily, I work in a magical place, and it doesn’t take much time to… Read more

  • A Week of Moments

    The butterfly counts not months, but moments, and has time enough. ~Rabindranath Tagore Last week was a busy one (actually, aren’t they all) at work with getting everything back out after the hurricane and preparing for and delivering several programs. And yet, it was still a week full of natural history highlights, brief moments when… Read more

  • Moths in a Storm

    Intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world… Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing. ~Robin Wall Kimmerer As the rains continue to pour down from what was the hurricane that mercifully just glanced by us here in the woods, we are both reading and pursuing some indoor activities. I decided to look… Read more

  • Florence Cats

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    If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine. ~Morris West Florence has already had a huge impact on things here in the Piedmont, far away from her predicted point of landfall. While this is minor compared to what people in the more direct path of the storm will… Read more

  • Hot Holiday

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    It’s summer and time for wandering… ~Kellie Elmore After I retired (you remember back when I was retired) I loved the fact that I could go to some of my favorite places on a week day when fewer people would be out and about in the wild places I love. I certainly didn’t want to… Read more

  • Mothing, Part 2

    Look closely. The beautiful may be small. ~Immanuel Kant The last post had some recognizable moths, some big ones, some brightly colored ones. But countless moths are frustratingly small (when you are trying to identify them), and many are, at least at first glance, LBT’s (little brown things). But the magic of a macro lens… Read more

Roads End Naturalist

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

Copyright Mike Dunn and Melissa Dowland