Birders are rejuvenated. Binoculars and spotting scopes have been cleaned and readied. Field guides have usurped The Da Vinci Code’s spot on the nightstand. Fall migration is in full swing.

Two ostriches with their heads buried in the sand were having a conversation. The first ostrich said, chuckling, “Man can you believe it — all those wild stories about the earth heating up and the oceans rising?”

I was clicking Izzy into her booster seat last Saturday about 9 p.m. when she said, “Look Daddy, there’s a bird.” We were on the top deck of Waynesville’s parking garage and it was dark.

“I bet you saw a bat,” I said.

I was working in the yard the other afternoon when I heard a crisp “whap!” — like the sound of a line drive in the third baseman’s mitt — just above my head. A pipevine swallowtail butterfly spun to the ground, wings flapping wildly. My first thought was a dragonfly must have made a grab for it. When I reached down to pick it up, I found a bald-faced hornet latched onto its head.

Nothing takes me back to that shotgun shack along the dusty road around Horseshoe Lake quicker than the call of the rain crow. In late July and early August it’s a common sound coming from the woods around my home in the early morning, late evening and in the grey stillness before a summer rain.

The king of insect migration – King Billy – will soon be gliding its way to Mexico by the millions. The monarch butterfly was dubbed “King Billy” by early North American settlers because its bright orange color reminded them of William of Orange, King of England.

One of the tenets of the theory of evolution is a phenomenon known as character displacement. Character displacement states, in essence, that when two similar species inhabit the same environment and compete for the same resources, natural selection favors a divergence in characters – be it physical or behavioral.

No, it’s not another reality TV series, and there’s no need to call in and vote for your favorite. But if you pause a moment with that first cup of coffee, you’ll notice that the mornings are becoming quieter. It’s hard for us sedentary humans, slogging through 90-degree heat and afternoon thunderstorms to realize, but autumn is just around the corner. Nature, however, runs on a more intuitive clock.

A federal judge in Arkansas halted on Thursday, July 20, an ambitious Army Corps of Engineers plan to pump water out of the White River to help farmers in Arkansas’ Grand Prairie region irrigate crops. The suit was brought by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and the Arkansas Wildlife Federation (AWF), two groups that have battled the controversial project for over a decade claiming that it would do irreparable damage to the southern bottomland habitat along the White and Cache Rivers.

About a million years ago, through a wormhole, while I was still in college and Grumman aluminum was state of the art in whitewater canoes, some friends and I made a trip to Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas to float the Rio Grande through Santa Elena and Mariscal canyons. It was a memorable trip, the canyons were awesome, the water was exciting and the company was exemplary.