All Outdoors
There is a bright side to everything, says a true optimist.
While I am not always optimistic, I do try to make lemonade out of lemons. Consider the problem of trash in our oceans. You may wonder, where is the good in that? Yet it’s true that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. I found a bounty of good garbage in the form of sea glass on a recent trip to Nicaragua.
Don’t let Mother Nature fool you. She can take a joke.
She was, perhaps, the original jokester, fooling us with species such as “false albacore” and “false foxglove,” and fooling us at this time of the year with crazy and variable weather. From snowstorms to sunny skies, anything is possible in April.
The charms of up-Island are numerous, but I had my own reasons to take a Sunday drive up Middle Road last weekend.
Topping my list of favorite up-Island things are Andy and Susie’s honey, fresh milk from Mermaid Farm, and a walk through the woodland wilds of Chilmark.
It is in these woods that one can find a plant not too often seen down-Island.
Birdfeeders are not only for the birds.
It is a virtual Noah’s Ark at my feeder, with a surprising diversity of wildlife taking their turn for a taste. The usual suspects are all there — chickadees, nuthatches, cardinals and blue jays, but recently some uninvited visitors have made an appearance.
Birds are changing their winter ranges as a result of climate change. Average temperatures in January have increased more than five degrees Fahrenheit in the continental United States between 1966 and 2005, and the ranges of many species of birds in the early winter have shifted northward.
You probably know the Island is under attack by invaders. They are not very conspicuous until one learns to look for them closely. For the most part, they are plants and are thus just seen as part of the background for most of us.