Wings Over Water, feet on cliff faces, heads in the sky and gorgeous fall weather. What better reasons for getting out this weekend?
Coast
If you’ve ever needed incentive to get outdoors, Wings Over Water is it. The appropriately acronymed “WOW,” in its 14th year, is a six-day celebration of the wildlife and natural history (as well as human history as it relates to the natural world) of Eastern North Carolina and the Outer Banks. Beginning this past Tuesday and running through Sunday, more than 100 guided programs are offered covering just about every element of the natural world in this surprisingly wild oasis on the eastern seaboard. Saturday alone, there are birding programs at Bodie Island, South Pond, Old Oregon Inlet, Cape Hatteras and Portsmouth Island; a tour exploring the natural and human history of Portsmouth Island village; digital photography workshops; an owl prowl; a sunset canoe tour of the Alligator River; and a night tram tour of the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge.read more
Curiously, when Marcy suddenly sounded like Curly in “We Want Our Mummy,” I thought back to a phone conversation we’d had last fall. I was on the Appalachian Trail, she was in our Cary backyard. I was in the wild, she was in suburbia. I was lounging at my campsite in the woods having tea, she was trying to figure out what to do with the four-foot copperhead sunning on our back deck. Subsequent Googling suggested that the sizable snake was likely a pregnant mama looking for a place to hunker down for the winter after giving birth — to as many as 14 slithering offspring. Marcy’s yelp this suggested that she had found said offspring.read more
Death, taxes, a hot-as-blazes Fourth of July — the givens of life here in the Piedmont.
Except this year the hot-as-blazes Fourth took a holiday. Or at least the humidity did: The temperature may have been 90, but the humidity was a dry 30 percent. Perfect weather for a summer hike, perfect weather for exploring the Eno River.read more
Wednesday, I was hiking along the North Prong of Shining Rock Creek, a lively mountain stream that plunges 2,200 feet in just three miles through a narrow, overgrown canyon. I was in a reveric trance, lulled in part by the rugged vegetation here in the Shining Rock Wilderness, in part by the cloudless, 70-degree spring afternoon, when — Whoa!
I like snakes, but their sudden appearance four feet away causes me to stop in my tracks and say, “Whoa!” Such impromptu meetups are common this time of year, as we humans hit the trail more and rising temperatures activate these cold-blooded critters. Being in the sun rejuvenates our spirit, it jumpstarts their system.
After catching my breath, I scoped out the critter, taking a couple of pictures, jotting some notes, searching my increasingly porous memory for clues about what kind of snake it might be. Not that my database was brimming to begin with.
When it comes to snakes and birds, I don’t expend a lot of my remaining gray storage memorizing types and species. Two reasons: One, there are thousands of species to begin with, and two, the same critter can look completely different depending on various factors:read more