The Poughkeepsie railroad bridge in 1978 (Library of Congress)

The High Line is about to be upstaged in truly spectacular fashion by the Walkway Over the Hudson, 80 miles to the north, which utilizes a world famous but long-abandoned railroad bridge whose 35-foot-wide deck is an awesome 212 feet--21 stories--above the river.

                       Tuliptree flower (by Les Line)
The spring tulips in our garden are but a memory as we enter June, but the tulips that will soon appear high on the relatively young tree by the steps to our door surpass in size and form any blossoms created in Dutch fields. They are the greenish-orange flowers of the tuliptree, also known as the yellow poplar although the species actually belongs in the magnolia family. Four inches across, these arboreal tulips produce copious amounts of nectar to pleasure neighborhood bees, and cone-like fruit whose winged seeds feed quail, cardinals, rabbits and squirrels. Even the massive leaves have a tulip shape, making it one of the more easily identified trees in eastern hardwood forests.

The miraculous splash landing of the U.S. Airways Airbus on the Hudson River yesterday (January 15th) with no loss of life reminded me of my own close call at just about the same spot on the evening of April 7, 1981. I was returning from a meeting at National Audubon Society's Washington office on the Eastern Airline shuttle with some 40 other passengers. And we were over the river at 3,000 feet near 34th Street, on the approach to LaGuardia airport, when our Boeing 727 flew into a flock of large birds, mostly likely Canada geese as in the latest collision.

Night came crisp and clear on a memorable Christmas Eve more than 20 years ago at Seasons, our country place in the Taconic Highlands that rise on the eastern edge of the broad Mid-Hudson Valley. The cloudless sky was fading from twilight-blue to black as the sun settled behind the Catskill Mountains to the west, but with an almost-full moon beaming down on a fresh quilt of snow, I could watch the horses in the pasture across the way munching on the last of their evening timothy. Could hear the crunch of their hooves in the snow, for not a wisp of wind stirred the air.

You probably don't. Contemplate pecans, that is. Except maybe in the holiday season, when bowls of deluxe mixed nuts (no peanuts) are strategically placed around cocktail parties, while open bins of unshelled walnuts, pecans, almonds, hazelnuts and Brazil nuts compete for your attention at the produce market. Indeed, when I was growing up in Michigan, my dad always brought home an assortment of hard-shelled tree nuts at Christmas time, Carnation Milk's annual gift to employes at the condensery over by the railroad tracks. We'd sit at the kitchen table with a nutcracker and picks, trying our best to remove the walnut and pecan halves in one piece but seldom succeeding. For as any nut lover will tell you, those sweet, buttery meats are the real prizes in the assortment.

It's not news that black bears across North America are being lured to urbanized areas by a cornucopia of garbage. As a result they are fatter and thus give birth to cubs much earlier than their cousins in outlying wild areas, according to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society. But they are also likely to die a violent death at a young age--usually in collisions with vehicles.

It seems like an odd moment to be writing about spring and summer wildflowers, what with Old Man Winter hovering on the horizon. But scientists from Harvard and Boston Universities have unsettling news about the impact of climate change on plant life in the New England woods. The researchers have drawn on Henry David Thoreau's detailed records from 150 years ago on the flora around his beloved Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.

Emperor penguins are the only birds that nest on ice, right? Wrong! The bird world has been shaken to the core (well, at least astonished) by news of a small finch that builds its bulky nest on glacial ice in the Peruvian Andes. The species is known as the white-winged diuca-finch (Diuca speculifera) and inhabits high mountain meadows in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. It belongs to the large Emberizidae family, making it a far distant relative (in geographic terms) of the American tree sparrow, Lapland longspur and snow bunting, all of which breed on the Arctic tundra in not-quite-so-harsh conditions.

The box elder trees along the wayside are now leafless, but certainly not barren. Their branches are heavy with hanging clusters of paired winged fruit, or keys, that will last through the coming winter and into spring. The seeds, one to each key, are an easy food source for squirrels, mice and birds like evening and pine grosbeaks. And that's probably the nicest thing you can say about an oddly and variously named native species that few people would consider a prized shade tree, though it was widely planted for that very purpose in times past.

The leaves came down in a rush in last weekend's wind-driven rain, and most of the trees in our woods are now barren except for the tenacious oaks, whose reddish-brown leaves hang on into winter. So when the sun came out, treasures that were hidden by green foliage all summer long suddenly popped into view. Sundry bird's nests, of course, including the little cup that a female ruby-throated hummingbird carefully constructed of plant fibers and down, spider webs and lichens in the ancient apple tree by the front porch.