As a child, summer vacation meant no classrooms and often, no walls. The world was like a blank book, open to a page where you could write that day’s adventure as you lived it. I remember bike rides down to the creek, bike convoys down to the tennis courts, or magical lands created around ...

Kids love dinosaurs. I did more than 55 years ago, and so did many of my friends. We collected and played with hard plastic toy models with long, hard-to-pronounce and spell names imprinted on them. Names like tyrannosaurus, stegosaurus, and plesiosaurus. The size, ferocity, and fear of real ...

I took a few minutes to poke around my yard before writing this today. My usual poking involves weeding, planting seeds and checking out how flowers and fruit are developing. Today, I was poking around for ideas to write about. Even though it is not very large, my yard is a delightful ...

Working in a garden can force a change in perspective. Kneeling down to get hands in the dirt, plants tower over the gardener. They no longer look down on plants but look through. On one particular day while gardening, I found myself face to face with sturdy stems and broad curved leaves ...

Linda and our grandson, Garek, burst into the apartment a few weeks ago excitedly out of breath. “We’ve got a nest with two white eggs to identify,” she said. “Sounds like a mourning dove,” I replied. “But it was on the ground,” Linda answered. That got my attention. ...

The local woodlands, wetlands and streambanks of the Chautauqua watershed beckon us to explore their gifts of natural beauty and biological diversity, and the complex community of creatures living there has much to teach us. One lovely but often over-looked group of organisms, the ferns, ...