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Although the only pine forests found in New Zealand are recent plantations of Northern Hemisphere Pinus species like the Monterey pine, the country does have native conifers. Some of these are found throughout the country, but the most impressive species is found in the north of the island, around the Coromandel and in Northland. This [...]

The absurdly strong storm system that moved through New York City on Thursday evening left a swath of destruction in its wake.  According to the National Weather Service there were two tornadoes, one in Park Slope Brooklyn, and one in Flushing, Queens, and a macroburst that blasted Middle Village and Forest Hills, Queens.  That last [...]

I’ve been on record for years as endorsing David Allen Sibley’s masterwork, The Sibley Guide to Birds as the first and foremost reference guide for anyone at all who looks at North American birds. Whether you consider yourself a bird watcher or not, you’ll never regret having this book on hand. But does Sibley’s preeminence [...]

Folks might remember that last year I did what I grandly called an Anti-Global Warming Big Year, the idea of which was was to see as many species as possible while burning as little carbon as possible.  To offset the carbon dioxide released from a flight to California and back from my home base in [...]

I love plants. You do too, whether you’re in touch with your vegephilia or not. Everything you eat or smoke and practically everything you drape on your body or put in your car to make it go derives directoy or indirectly from the vegetable kingdom. Plants are part and parcel of our environment. In fact, [...]

Way back when I started my Anti-Global Warming Big Year I decided that if I flew somewhere and stayed there for more than a couple of days I could count the birds I saw there provided I offsetted the carbon that the flight produced.  So I counted a bunch of birds in California that I [...]

I’m thrilled to be hosting this edition of the world’s greatest aggregation of arboreal blog brilliance. It should come as no surprise that I spend plenty of time looking at trees. In fact, over the next few weeks, I plan on scanning the canopy with an intensity that will undoubtedly result in either eye strain [...]

So here I am, innocently trying to figure out why we need both Earth Day and Arbor Day in the same week when yet another shred of my ecological innocence is torn asunder. No, it wasn’t the revelation that Arbor Day always falls on the last Friday of April in the U.S. that horrifies me. [...]