Each year I train for the half marathon by running the trails in the Park. You might have passed me while out for a walk. I run that slowly. The slower you run, the less you miss. This is the only benefit I have found so far to my pace. Last week, I was crossing… Read more »
Fifty years ago, any suggestion that an animal was more than a stimulus-response machine would be met with accusations of anthropomorphism — ascribing to animals some attribute that could only belong to humans. Pavlov rang his bell each time he fed the dogs and eventually, the dogs so associated the bell with the food that… Read more »
On television, we watch a show about lions. We watch a lioness raise her cubs. They are cute. But the narrator says in his slightly hushed narrator voice, “If she doesn’t find food soon, she will be forced to abandon her cubs.” Then, we see footage of a lioness taking down a young antelope. We… Read more »
Last year, a pair of red-shouldered hawks raised their chicks in a sycamore tree north of the bayou just east of the Shepherd bridge. Red-shouldered hawks will re-use a nest multiple times, but they will also abandon a nest, so it is exciting to report that last year’s nest is being used again. However, this… Read more »
Before you were born, kids listened to hot singles on small vinyl disks with a big chunky hole in the middle. They were played at a speed of 45 rpm rather than the usual 33 1/3 rpms that larger albums were played at. We called them 45s. On one side, they had the song you… Read more »
Field of Dreams is a 1989 movie in which a voice whispers to a farmer, “if you build it, they will come.” On the strength of this, he builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield. They turn out to be the 1919 White Sox who do come and play. It’s all very magical. Buffalo Bayou… Read more »
I have a nemesis in the plant world. Dogfennel. This weed, in which apparently no one is interested, has blindsided me time and again. Dogfennel is the kind of weed you don’t even really notice. That’s a photo of it above and you can hardly find the outlines of the plant. The only reason I… Read more »
This week, I visited our miracle prairie and was blown away by how birdy it was. This almost never happens, but that prairie was genuinely full of birds. Maybe not rarely seen birds, but it was full of the birds that should have been there. I saw ruby crowned kinglets, phoebes, orange crowned warblers, a… Read more »
Everyone stay calm. We are going to talk about snakes, and trigger warning, there is video. I adore coral snakes. They are lovely, secretive and very docile. You pretty much have to ask one to bite you. They have tiny mouths and their fangs are short and fixed unlike most of our venomous snakes. Most… Read more »
In the summer, almost every night, Swainson’s hawks fly through the stream of bats emerging from the Waugh Drive bridge and indulge in an orgy of bat consumption. They grab a bat in one claw and put it in their mouth, often while grabbing another. I really should have written about this in the spring… Read more »