Wetlands Mel Shaw I’m in love all over again. Each spring I revisit one of David M. Carroll’s outstanding wetland books: The Year of the Turtle: A Natural History, Swampwalker’s Journal: A Wetlands Year, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook. Even while flurries still sting my cheeks, I turn to Carroll as a gateway into the coming months when I will explore my own water meadow, marshlands and vernal pools. And I am happy to bask in his fine words, …
A Gift of Wings Merak’s feather, beautifully beaded for me by my friend Mireille Lapointe Long ago, through the Ministry of Natural Resources, my husband and I were given the gift of caring for, and hopefully rewilding, a young red-tailed hawk, whom we called Merak. I wrote about this remarkable adventure in my book A Wing in the Door, Life With a Red-tailed Hawk. As it turned out, two year old Merak was completely imprinted on humans, and in spite …
My Lost Woods The Lost Woods I have never forgotten nature writer Edwin Way Teale’s remembrance of an Indiana woods he encountered where he was surrounded by “great silent winter trees—oak, beech, hickory, ash and sycamore.” As a small boy he had travelled there with his grandfather. Then, while his grandfather loaded stove wood on their bobsleigh, he had wandered through “gloomy aisles between the trees. Branches rubbed together in the breeze with sudden shrieks or mournful wailings and the …