Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

It's amazing how spending a little time outside can revitalize your sense of well being. For me, nothing makes me happier than when I'm birding. Being able to spend time with birds is necessary for my well being as a human being, they speak to my very soul. That said, after spending a week on the Bogue Banks, I knew I needed to start finding hotspots to check out. While the Outer Banks is a prime migratory stopover for shorebirds, getting there can be difficult especially if you haven't gotten a handle on the ferry schedule yet. For my purposes starting out, the closest and easiest to reach was the public beach access at Bogue Inlet in Emerald Isle, NC. Finding the beach access was easy enough, but finding adequate parking was trickier. Like many towns with beachfront property, parking on the sides of roads is prohibited with limited opportunities to find free parking unless you are within proximity of a business district or public beach lot. Initially, the only lot I c...

Writing has always been a way for me to express what I see in the natural world and to focus things that many don't take the time to appreciate in their busy lives. The past couple of months have piled up without so much as a wink of information as to why I stopped writing. I'm not going to go into depth here, but I don't think that just saying "life happened" is a justified answer either. Last night, I read a blog post by author and serial wanderer, Ken Ilgunas as he lamented not updating his blog and how his uncertainty made him feel inadequate about where his future lay. This experience spoke to me deeply as does all his writing. On the drive down to North Carolina, I listened to his first book, Walden on Wheels about his two and half year journey to become debt free after college during which he traveled across the country, working odd jobs and eventually living in a van for several semesters while in graduate school at Duke. The past seven months have ...