We left El Paso on Feb. 22, 2½ weeks after returning from Ecuador, for a 7½ month trip through western North America, complementing the focus of 2017 on the center on the continent, and 2018 on the east. The primary goal of the trip is to explore Alaska and northwestern Canada, which we last did […]
Category: Natural History
Ecuador and Thermal Scoping
Eileen and I just got back from 20 days in Ecuador on a birding tour (“Jewels of Ecuador”), run by Field Guides, Inc., with whom we have previously traveled to Kenya, Brazil, and Thailand. The group was fairly small, with 7 participants, simplifying the logistics as everyone could fit in a single vehicle (a small […]
2018 Wrap-up
Leaving Cape May, we headed west to Front Royal, VA, to repeat the drive we did last fall, down the Skyline Drive (through Shenandoah National Park) and the Blue Ridge Parkway, as far as Asheville, NC. The fall color was very inferior this year, with only a few decent areas, at the very highest elevations. […]
Cape May Migration
Starting September 29, we spent 16 days in Cape May, NJ, a peninsula famous for its fall bird migration. It is a very interesting area because the migration is exceptionally diverse (involving songbirds, raptors, and seabirds), complex (in terms of the effects of weather and geography), and well-studied (with several long-running counts organized by the […]
New England
Leaving the James Bay region in mid-August, we stopped for the night in Ashuapmushuan Provincial Park, southeast of Chibougamau, Quebec. We expected to head out first thing in the morning, but discovered that, despite the remoteness, we had a good cell signal, enabling us to catch up on a number of tasks that had piled […]
James Bay
This blog posting is more than twice the usual length, to keep the information on this infrequently visited area within a single entry. After finishing up our “Southeast” agenda, which took about six months, there were no firm plans for the remainder of the year. Cooler weather, more remote camping, and paddling opportunities sounded good, […]
Southern Appalachia
Leaving the Great Smokies, we headed north on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This scenic mountain road, with many pull-outs, runs 469 miles through North Carolina and Virginia, without a traffic light or stop sign. It joins up seamlessly with the Skyline Drive, which adds another 105 miles of the same as it winds through Shenandoah […]
The Great Smokies
On the way from the Missouri Ozarks to the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, we spent two days in southern Illinois, as it was not much out of the way, and we’d done no field work in that state before, just driven across it a number of times. We visited […]
Ozarks and Ouachitas
Eileen is a Civil War aficionado, and had been looking forward to visiting some battlefields she had not previously seen. So we spent the first four days after leaving Alabama touring four battlefields at Shiloh, TN; Corinth, MS; Davis Bridge, TN; and Brice’s Crossroads, MS (listed in chronological order of the battles). The National Historic […]
Uplift Can Be So … Uplifting
Alabama proved to be a very interesting place to botanize, in part because of its diverse geology. We visited seven areas in the northern part of the state, some principally limestone (producing neutral to somewhat alkaline conditions) and others primarily sandstone or granite (both usually acidic). A key event in the geological history of the […]
Nomadic Naturalists 