We were in Trinidad to “bird.” Yes, the verb of the word bird: to look for birds. It was our last vacation before the coronavirus pandemic. Trinidad is an independent republic and the southernmost island in the Caribbean Sea, lying just seven miles off Venezuela’s coast. It is one of...
Most of the world remains sequestered at home from the COVID-19 pandemic. Demonstrators with assault weapons dressed in military gear protest stay-at-home orders. You might get harassed for wearing a face mask in public. Our political divide widens. Farming Proceeds Despite the Pandemic On the farm, there are no politics...
Winter in Swoope The grasslands in Swoope are brown and dormant. Late in the afternoon I stand on our deck with my binoculars and search the wide-open pastures for Short-eared Owls. I can see for several miles north and sweep slowly 180 degrees to the south. First, I spot a...
“If you save your own backyard, then you start to save the world,” wrote the late Winston Nanon, the man who saved the Caroni Swamp and the bird that became the national bird of Trinidad—the Scarlet Ibis.
May miracles in Swoope Lush, green pastures fill the landscape, here at the beginning of the Chesapeake Bay in the Shenandoah Valley along Middle River. Baby calves form up in groups and run fast with their tails high in the air. The smell of lilacs fills the air. A new...
This is the place . . . Swoope. I wrote a book about it . . . Swoope Almanac, Stories of love, land, and water in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
Jeanne and I recently traveled to the most remote island of the British Virgin Islands—Anegada. Most mornings, we were the only people on the beach at the Anegada Beach Club. The beaches here are the most beautiful we have ever experienced with white sand and crystal clear water loaded with...
I watched it devour a whole nest of tent caterpillars. Yellow-billed Cuckoos, we need a lot more of them – they prefer to eat hairy caterpillars like the eastern tent caterpillar that defoliate trees. The Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Coccyzus americanus, sometimes called the rain crow, nests and forages in the riparian forests along our...
As we drove into the pasture with a half-ton bale of hay for the cows I saw a flock of perhaps thirty small birds fly in a tight pattern away from us.
Over the years they slowly disappeared. And then they were gone. I last saw a Loggerhead Shrike in Swoope in 2014. The Loggerhead Shrike is a “common bird” whose population is in “steep decline”. In this post, I will describe the bird, chronicle its population, report efforts to bring the...
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