Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

May-apples ( Podophyllum peltatum ) As summer steadily marches towards us, the countryside reminds us about the wonderful variety of wildflowers that flock the roadsides and dazzle the fields and woods. Flowers are a universal sign of nature and of her wonderful spread of colors, forms, and scents that blanket the landscape in the warmer months of the year. Many of the flowers we see along our roadsides and throughout our woods and fields are transplants brought over from Europe and Asia. Some like purple loosestrife ( Lythrum salicaria ) and garlic mustard ( Alliaria petiolata ) are nuisance species that take over areas of habitat that other native plants once thrived in. According to a report published in Ecological Economics , "an estimated 5000 plant species have escaped and now exist in U.S. natural ecosystems, compared with a total of about 17,000 species of native U.S. plants." (Pimental, Zuniga, and Morrison, 2004) This is damaging to many ecosystems found in ...

There are a lot of interesting things people have chosen to write about in this world. Some focus on the politics and problems of the world at large, while others write about their pet hobbies and ideas. I have chosen to write about an obsession of mine which is as large and varied as the world it encompasses. Those of you that visit regularly (despite the slow updates) know that the subject this blog covers is all things nature.  But why nature?  It seems like a simple question, but really it can be answered in so many ways. I will never know what precisely perked my interest in nature to start with. Maybe it was the day I watched a blackbird play over the garden hedge in Wales as a young boy, or the first time I ran terrified from my fishing rod when I caught my first ever Bluegill ( Lepomis macrochirus ). Perhaps it was the first time I canoed with my family down the Sudbury River taking in the smell of the water, the Red-winged Blackbirds ( Agelaius phoenicus ...