The Nature of Things

The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell My rating: 4 of 5 stars Uhtred Ragnarson is a divided man. He was a Saxon, born in 9th century Northumbria, at a time when England was regularly being raided by the viking Danes. He grew up in a time of warfare and learned to fight at his father's side, which is where he was when his father was killed by Danes in battle. Uhtred was still a child but he fought so savagely against his father's killers that he impressed Ragnar, their leader. Instead of killing him, Ragnar captured and eventually adopted him, and so the Saxon boy grew up as a Dane. Uhtred was fully Dane in his culture. He admired the Danes and loved his adoptive family. He received his post-graduate course in fighting from them and so he learned both the Saxon way and the Danes' way of battle. It was to serve him well in later years. We meet Uhtred here as a brash and arrogant twenty-year-old, cocksure of his own strength and his power to overcome all enemies. Not a pleasa...

Not exactly what winter looks like in my neck of the woods, this is actually Rocky Mountain National Park from a trip that we took there a couple of years ago. Ogden Nash was the master of the short and pithy form of poetry. Here's one that he wrote about winter. The winter he describes is certainly not the one that we are having this year, but it's the winter of our imaginations. Winter Morning  by Ogden Nash Winter is the king of showmen Turning tree stumps into snow men And houses into birthday cakes And spreading sugar over lakes Smooth and clean and frosty white The world looks good enough to bite That's the season to be young Catching snowflakes on your tongue Snow is snowy when it's snowing I'm sorry it's slushy when it's going

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : The Sora is a small member of the secretive rail family that winters along the southern tier of states, including South Texas. I photographed this one last March along one of the trails at the South Padre Island Birding and Nature Center. We saw several species of rail on that walk, but this was the only one that was cooperative enough to pose for me.   *~*~*~* Threats and intimidation are something that federal employees who are caretakers of public lands throughout the West have to deal with on a regular basis. In that regard, the actions of the armed domestic terrorists still occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon after two weeks are nothing new. They are just a piece of a much larger picture. This week the usurpers took down a fence , supposedly to allow cows to come onto refuge grounds and graze, and they cleared a new road on refuge property. How long will this damage to our public lands be allowe...

Here we are at mid-January and still we've had no killing frost this winter in my zone 9a garden. Our lowest temperature of the season so far has been 34 degrees F.  There are a few micro-zones in the garden where the merest touch of frost has occurred a couple of times, but, overall, plants that would normally be long-dormant are still showing a green face to the sun, and there are more blooms still going in the garden than I can ever remember at this time in January.  This is 'Peggy Martin' rose which is just now putting on its first flush of blooms for the year. Normally, this would come in March. This old pink Knockout rose has bloomed continuously since fall and it still has a few blooms open every day. My last milkweed plant that still has leaves also has blossoms. The other plants were all completely devoured by Monarch caterpillars in December. Yellow cestrum would usually be resting in January but not this year. And those Monarch butterflies that grew from the cate...

Black Skies by Arnaldur Indriðason My rating: 3 of 5 stars If Sigurður Óli lived in 2016 America, he'd be a yuge Donald Trump supporter. He would attend the rallies (probably wearing a tee shirt with the Confederate flag emblazoned on it) and would happily participate in the evicting and maybe roughing up of any protesters or Muslims who dare to show up. He is an angry right-winger who is dissatisfied with the way Icelandic society is going. It's letting in too many immigrants. It's providing too strong a safety net. It's too soft on crime. That last one is the one that really gets his goat, because he is with the Reykjavik police, which forces him to place constraints on his basest - and racist - instincts. His ideal is America. He attended police academy in America. His favorite place for a vacation is Orlando, Florida. He loves American television and American sports, especially baseball and football. He is enthralled by American capitalism and by the young tycoons...

Male Purple Martin photographed at our backyard martin house some years ago. These are the birds that are our first spring migrant arrivals. The adult male scouts generally start arriving here in late January. None have been reported in Texas yet, but they are already arriving in Florida and Georgia and soon they will be present all across the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. These birds are long distance migrants. Most of the martins that nest in the eastern half of North America fly across the Gulf of Mexico in spring and fall, although some probably take the land route through Mexico. They spend their late falls and winters distributed throughout much of South America and their springs and summers throughout eastern and central North America right up into Canada. By mid-April, they will have made it all the way up into New England and many will continue even farther north. Purple Martins have lived in close proximity to human beings for hundreds of years. Native Americans u...

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham My rating: 4 of 5 stars I don't often find myself reading best-sellers while they are still on the New York Times top ten list. I'm usually late to the party. Years late, in most cases. But I read a review of John Grisham's latest, Rogue Lawyer, and I was intrigued and decided to get on the bandwagon and read it right away. Grisham's narrative takes off with the power and speed of a locomotive and just continues to gather steam over the next 300 or so pages until he delivers us safely into the station once again. He has stolen the germ of an idea from Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer (all writers steal; they just need to make sure the take from the best as Grisham has), but Grisham's Sebastian Rudd is definitely not a "Lincoln." He is a Ford van lawyer. His base of operations is a customized bulletproof (and it needs to be!) van with Wi-Fi, fine leather chairs, a bar, a small fridge, as well as a hidden gun compart...