With nature

There’s nothing like a talk show to spark an idea for a column. Hosts Kelly Ripa and her husband, Mark Consuelos, recently discussed how people’s first names often serve as clues to the decade in which they were born. Some names that are rarely chosen today were popular in previous decades.  The given name that…

I’m calling it.   I drove around the long way, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the patch before we actually began hiking up into The Canyon. Partly because I wanted to see what I was getting into and partly because I wanted to make sure she was still there. I honestly wasn’t sure…

The longest day of the year has officially come and gone, which means we are now on the slow, downhill slide toward winter.  Given that the days are currently long and the temperatures are nearing their peak, my family has opted for the traditional summer beach vacation. This is nothing new since we’ve rented a…

As a budding naturalist growing up in the concrete-heavy environs of Boston, I would regularly thumb through my family’s collection of nature books and daydream about the creatures within. One species I was particularly drawn to was the eastern box turtle. These charismatic terrestrial turtles have high-domed shells festooned with colorful yellow or orange markings…