Maybe We Should Call it “Sprinter”

The light is changing now, do you see it? Each day, the sun moves higher into the architecture of the trees’ bare branches as it travels across the sky.  During the brief interval that our deciduous trees are still properly naked, I like to spend time with the unimpeded night sky—Orion sprawls overhead, and brilliant Jupiter rises in the east after sunset. But pure winter, if we ever had it, is nearly over.  January brings complicated weather to North Florida.  Cold fronts … Continue

Bears on the Edge

Last week I went searching for evidence of Florida black bears down along our coast.  They are shy creatures, generally night-dwelling.  I always watch for them, though, and as the poet Mary Oliver says “…everywhere I look on the scratchy hillsides, shadows seem to grow shoulders.”   I walked in places I know they forage and walk.  I found acorns they hadn’t yet eaten on the side of the road.         I saw scat they had left in the … Continue

Starfish, and a poem for dark nights

January is off to a bitter cold start in the panhandle of Florida. Along highway 98, I watch the north wind shove sea water off the shallows of Apalachee Bay.  It is low tide: the influential waning moon bares the bay bottom even further.Is it my imagination, or does the sand appear to shiver? Shorebirds have fled for shelter along the backside of the islands. Thousands of scaup and redhead ducks raft tightly in the thin water. A good day … Continue

Divine Counting

Here is how the Christmas Bird Count found me on the third-to-last day of 2014: suspended between the divinity of the wild birds, and their utter vulnerability to human whims. The territory that is ours to count in the annual Christmas census extends from the junction of 30A and Cape San Blas Road, and Stump Hole, on the St. Joe Peninsula.  Our favorite stretch, and the most productive bird-wise, is the beach. It used to be—just a year or two … Continue