Nature

Where are you going for the 4th of July this year? Hiking the western North Carolina Mountains, where you could go for a hike up Mount Mitchell (the highest peak east of the Mississippi)? Camping in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area of the Pisgah National Forest? You could plan on spending the day trout fishing […]

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, […]

At first glance, Eastern hardwood forests seem a homogenous block of green, but if you train your eye and look closer, you’ll notice subtle differences. Wild North Carolina: Discovering the Wonders of Our State’s Natural Communities helps amateur naturalists do just that. Botanist Michael Schafale describes more than two dozen unique communities, several of which […]

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

If you could travel back in time to the Carolinas Piedmont before European settlement, some of the landscape might look a bit like this clearing in northwestern Mecklenburg County, tucked under swooping Duke Energy power lines. Here, a spring breeze whispers through slim brown stalks of last season’s little bluestem and Indian grass. Wild quinine […]

Our yard in the Uwharries always looks especially mangy in early spring. I wouldn’t presume to call it a lawn. That sounds much too manicured and highfalutin. The fescue is green, but it tends to get lost in a flush of winter annuals like chickweed, buttercups and henbit. These weeds will die back after setting […]

One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, gentle breeze blowing, sweet tea in hand, listening to the buzz and flight of hummingbirds as they gracefully sipped sugar water from bright red feeders. Sometimes there’d be more than a dozen of them, dancing acrobatically in the air, […]

If you’ve driven by the Low Water Bridge recently, you probably have seen a good bit of bulldozer activity and wondered what exactly was happening to this beautiful natural area. The work is being undertaken with a promising objective in mind. The LandTrust of Central N.C. is partnering with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to […]