ENVIRONMENT

While walking on my grandparents’ property last week, I was fortunate to stumble upon one of the most common and understated orchids in bloom – the Crane-fly orchid (Tipularia discolor). We typically think of orchids as something rare and eye-catching, with vibrant colors that stand out vividly from a woodland backdrop. The Crane-fly orchid, however, […]

Green walls in downtown Charlotte? Almost any visitor to the Charlotte area will remark about one key feature that I think all of us who live here are proud of – how green the area is. But if you’ve lived here any length of time you’re also probably aware that the greenery – particularly our […]

It was a hot night in a hot city the day after the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. By 7 the temperature had slid from the 90s to the high 80s, as I pulled up in front of a 1960s split-level on a half-acre lot in a vast subdivision of 2,450 single-family […]

The Handy Sanitary District offered its plan to bring wastewater treatment service to the Badin Lake area more than a decade ago. Given concerns about leaking septic tanks, few disputed the need, but when people learned the proposal included a discharge into the Uwharrie River, the community rallied to oppose it. Scores attended community meetings, […]

Although some folks find snakes incredibly fascinating, and others shriek in terror and run from them, most people are somewhere in the middle – either casually interested or coolly indifferent. If I see a snake in the woods, I’ll likely get close enough to take a picture and identify it, and then carry on my […]

Tea has been synonymous with political protest ever since colonists dumped shiploads of the stuff into Boston Harbor in a 1773 act of rebellion against the Crown. In historian Eric Rutkow’s recent book, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation, he notes that trees were an equally potent symbol of liberty in […]

Several years ago, when we were planning to change the way we manage some of our land, I happened to meet Bob Askins, a biology professor at Connecticut College and author of Restoring North America’s Birds: Lessons from Landscape Ecology. As we discussed my projects, he encouraged me to do a baseline inventory before we […]

What better summertime activity for a kid in the country than playing in a creek? There is really nothing better than sticking your feet in a cool stream under the forest canopy where it feels 10 degrees cooler than in the sun. And whenever I walk in the woods and come up to a rocky […]

Katydids, (also known as bush-crickets in Britain), are insects in the family Tettigoniidae. They are sometimes referred to as long-horned grasshoppers, but are actually more closely related to crickets. Katydids differ from grasshoppers in that they have very long antennae, while grasshoppers have short and thick antennae. Of the more than 6,400 species of katydid, […]

Photos by Ruth Ann Grissom Related article: The abundant diversity of the hardwood forest