Discovering the world around me.
One day last fall, we were making a batch of apple wine from apples we’d harvested from our tree. We mixed the must, put in the apples, and set the buckets on the basement floor where it’s cool and out of the way. Within minutes, a column of ants was lined up to harvest the […]
Continue reading Super Women: Carpenter Ants
Raccoons have captured the fancy of cartoonists, authors, movie makers, comic strip artists, and even video game creators for decades. Rocky Raccoon, for instance, began his cartoon career in 1937, and has outlasted several generations of children and voice actors. Before Rocky hit the big screen, native Americans had created a plethora of tales with […]
Continue reading Masked Bandit: Raccoon
Grass seems to be everywhere. On Owl Acres, it covers the yard around the house, the open spaces around the barn, and the ditches along the road. Most of the species are not native to Owl Acres, though. They’ve been introduced as forage species for cattle, or lawn species for the yard. Most of the […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 5: Layers of Grass
It was 1:30 in the morning. Bryan woke me with “Listen.” Through the fuzz of sleep, I heard it—a pair of great horned owls singing their love songs to each other. They were somewhere in the woods on the northwest corner of Owl Acres. His voice was lower in pitch than hers, and their hoots […]
Continue reading Ruler of the Night: Great Horned Owl
It’s winter, so it’s not very hard to imagine ice and snow on Owl Acres. But it is hard to imagine thousands of feet of it, compressed into a gigantic glacier that stretches from here back north to the north pole. That’s what Owl Acres looked like though some 2.3 million years ago when the […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 4: Layers of Ice
On a January night, the air is still. The overnight temps hold in the teens and twenties, and the humidity is close to 100%. The conditions are perfect for one of Owl Acres’ beautiful winter creations–hoar frost. The word “hoar” is archaic but means “grayish white; gray or gray-haired.” It’s like wisps of fog frozen […]
Continue reading Winter Words
Back in the far ancient past, around 2 billion years ago, a supercontinent called Rodinia is thought to have formed. It started breaking up around 780 million years ago, but the core of it stayed together and in time became the Laurentian Craton. This mass of rock would eventually form the foundation of the continent […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 3: Layers of Life
We put a new mix of seed in the bird feeder this week. It has more corn and peanuts in it than the last batch. This morning seeds are scattered on the ground beneath the feeder. Here’s a chipmunk stuffing his cheek pouches with it. He runs away toward his burrow, then comes back empty-cheeked […]
Continue reading Sailing into the Wind
Owl Acres stands on a specific if tiny place on the earth’s surface. It can be measured in longitude, latitude and altitude coordinates and thus pinpointed precisely. With the help of satellites, my phone can give me those exact coordinates, and they would be unique to this very spot on the entire globe. But Owl […]
Continue reading Beneath My Feet Part 2: Layers of Time
As we survey the life on Owl Acres, we have been thinking about the big things. We owe a lot, though, to those tiny one-celled organisms that are everywhere. Yeast for instance. Yeast cells are so small that you need a microscope to see them. And yet, each individual cell is a living, active member […]
Continue reading Cheers!