Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

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 ...

After dealing with the piles of snow that have graced New England the past fortnight, my girlfriend Alison and I went to check out two Mass Audubon sanctuaries south of Boston. We first toured the Sharon Beals exhibit at the Museum of American Bird Art in Canton, where the exhibit featured the photographers portraits of birds nests from all over the world. We looked at each of the nests lining the walls of the art gallery as they portrayed the many ways birds build nests ranging from the neat weavings of sparrows and thrushes, to the simple depressions of shorebirds, and then to the macabre stick and bone nest of the House Wren ( Troglodytes aedon ). This sometimes horrid, little songbird has the nasty habit of taking over the nests of other songbirds and will even pierce the eggs and kill the chicks inside to secure the nest site for themselves. The nest in the photograph, set on black to show the subtle details that had gone into each nest, was lined with the dessicated remains of th...