Frank Graham's Posts
"I'd like you to meet my friend, John Jones. And this here is John's wife."
Hello? I didn't get that. Is there a man with brain so numb that he'd make such an introduction today? Yet that's how the field guides present songbirds to us.
"Behold, this resplendent organism is a vermilion flycatcher. And this dingy creature skulking in the background is the female."
"It is pleasant to have been to a place by the way a river went," Henry David Thoreau wrote. Just my sentiments, as I surveyed the Buffalo National Scenic River on a trip to northern Arkansas in early May. The river suggets a kind of serpentine vitality, and on this day its taut surface resembled the smoothness of mercury as it coiled into a bend in the near distance. I was eager to launch our rented canoe and be swept along to our takeout point five miles below.
Have you ever been bitten by a brown recluse spider? No? Then you seem to be in a minority of Americans.
For years now, friends and acquaintances in all parts of the country have told me about how they, or someone they know, was bitten by a brown recluse. Some victims became seriously ill. One or two died. I heard that there is hardly a bedroom curtain or a bath towel hamper that doesn't harbor a lurking arachnid, eager to feast on human flesh.
Vernacular names are the poetry of birding. Bobolink, tufted titmouse, groove-billed ani, crested auklet: many are fun to say, and any one of them may strike a reminiscent chord in us, calling to mind an eventful day or a special place where we saw the bird, perhaps once, perhaps a hundred times. The name reverberates, like a thrilling poem or a haunting melody.
The late-summer marsh grasses along Beaver Meadow Brook were awash. Though I had often explored the brook by small boat and its shoreline on foot, I had never before seen them under such an expanse of water. The season's highest tides, listed for that day in the charts at 13 feet, four inches, had surged into this mile-and-a-half stretch of saltwater marsh on the eastern Maine coast and spread over its elevated muddy fringes.
