Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label birds

Another Publishing Triumph!

So, the first of four poems has dropped. Point your critical browser to this URL for lots of good stuff at Ekstasis :  https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/poetry/2023/bird-is-the-word Constructive criticism welcome!

Suburban Renewal

Kill yer grass! That's not what Doug Tallamy calls for directly in Bringing Nature Home , but he might as well have. According to his research there exists in the continental U.S. only 3-5% of undisturbed area left. Now, he doesn't quite define what this means (I take it as areas of no permanent human activity), but his point is that we have plowed under most of the habitat that used to exist here. We have plowed it under for farmland and malls, for highways and hospitals, but we've eradicated the majority of space that non-human creatures use as habitat. To make things worse in the place of native plants--which are absolutely necessary to life on this spherical rock (all plants are necessary in their proper place)--we have planted ornamentals that have no enemies here (meaning the U.S.) nothing to check their spread and therefore nothing to feed on them, plants that don't support the life that is supposed to be here. I've covered Tallamy's doom and gloom s...

It's Official. . .

Spring is here. I saw a great blue heron flying over (of all places) Telegraph at Grand River, probably following the Rouge upstream. Don't robins act as the harbingers of spring, you ask. No, those traitorous emigres can usually be seen in late February eating I don't know what. That's just another reason to delist the robin as our state bird. So, says I, let's make the appearance of that feathered pteradactyl the barometer of the vernal appearance. What say ye?