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...

I know most people see them as walking, swimming, and flying terrors out to steal your chips and ice cream, but I like gulls for two reasons. One reason is that their almost ubiquitous presence along our shores seems almost miraculous today because of the ways they were nearly eradicated up to 150 years ago. The adults were hunted for their feathers and wings to adorn the hats of fashionable society ladies in the mid to late 1800s, while the eggs were collected from their offshore colonies for fine diners in New York, Boston, and Pittsburgh. Thankfully the slaughter was stopped by the Audubon Society and other concerned citizens and today they are one of our most ubiquitous citizens along our shores, lakes, and beaches. The second reason I have taken a shine to them is that because of their common presence around the parking lot where I now sit (and wait for hunters to hopefully come in and allow me to survey them on their success at hunting Oldsquaws. Yeah birding community, I just we...