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Friday: Outdoors

Outdoors North: Patiently waiting for the bird’s song to return

“Bird on the horizon, sitting on a fence, he’s singing his song for me at his own expense,” — Bob Dylan Rolling along the highway with the window down, fence posts blur and the warm wind comes whipping inside the car, it swirls around me and goes out the open window on the passenger side. Tree swallows overhead twist back and forth as they fly. A bluebird sits on a fence rail, just a couple of feet away from a wooden birdhouse the bright male bird has claimed as his summer residence. I see a highway sign and slow down to make my right turn off the blacktop onto a graveled ...

After a long winter, send your houseplants on a summer vacation

Most houseplants are tropical plants that require the warm, somewhat humid conditions of their natural habitat. In the home, many can become tired-looking, especially over winter, when even your brightest window provides lower-than-ideal light levels. So why not send your houseplants on a ...

Outdoors North

I recall the small, dilapidated shack standing broken and falling apart there alongside the corroded railroad tracks. The beat-up structure was made of splintered wood and rusty nails, and had at one time served the railroad as a place to store things used in track maintenance. Between the rails, grass had grown up amid the bedding and the railroad ties where it dried in the summer sunshine. It was a warm day, and I was happy to sit down and “take a five” as my dad used to say. I began a reverie which brought my mind back through the old trains we’d see as kids, smiling ...

New research offers hope in the war against the emerald ash borer

MARQUETTE — Every fall for years, Deborah McCullough and her husband fished salmon from Western Michigan’s Betsie River. “It’s a little river, and it was shaded, and you knew there was going to be big salmon in the deep spot over there under the shade,” she said. But all that ...

Outdoors North

It was in the very early morning hours when I slipped outside the back door to the yard to look at the “blood moon,” a full lunar eclipse which casts the moon’s face in a rusty red tint. Just a couple steps out there, I was disappointed to see the moon shrouded in a thick white woolen sock’s worth of clouds. It was only visible in an opaque fashion. Clearly, this was not the grand event I had hoped for with a big, fiery blood moon shining above my head in the night sky, big and bright. I could see that the lunar eclipse had begun with a dark shadow covering the bottom ...