Dusk, late summer. A deer works the edge of the pasture. A lonely frog, peeping, is answered by a cricket. As the light slips, a bat skitters in and out of the shrinking circle I can see.
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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9/27/23
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The bones look like driftwood from a distance, half-submerged at the high tide line. Binoculars reveal them to be ancient stone artifacts. Or so it seems. This whale carcass is hard to believe.
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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9/27/23
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Last month my wife was attacked while running near our home in Lakebay. It was dusk. She had just left the paved county road for a forest road when she felt something grab her hair and yank upward. …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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8/30/23
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It is a joy to come across a wasp like this. In the matted thick grass where my pasture will flood in winter, it dances along the stalks, wings flashing, blue-black body orienting this way and that. …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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8/2/23
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Last October, for the first time in recent memory, a bear paid a visit to Herron Island. By the time word got out and folks went looking, it was nowhere to be found, swum back to the mainland.
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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6/28/23
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Venus has phases, like the moon. Our neighbor planet is putting on a show these days, high in the western sky, the first point of light to appear as sunset fades. On June 4 it will reach its greatest …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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5/31/23
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For Jim Watts, spring means time on the road with hundreds of thousands of bees in his truck. One by one he visits an ever-growing list of home orchards, hobby farms, clearcuts and gardens. At each, …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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4/27/23
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The wren is basically a mouse. It weaves through ferns. Then it appears on a stump not 10 feet away. It glances at us and, without a second thought, goes about its inspection of the stump’s …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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4/27/23
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If you want to feel like a shrimp in a kelp forest, a good place to start is in a real forest on a windy day, your back on a log, trees flexing like grasses above you, the sky crowded with clouds …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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3/29/23
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Q: What’s with the hummingbirds in January? Are they dive-bombing? I thought the high-pitch chirp was a squirrel, but those are hummingbirds?
— Megan Schowalter, Longbranch
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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3/1/23
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On the Key Peninsula of old, you could hire a “beeliner” …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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3/1/23
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Visitors pass through the Key Peninsula and notice only our impressive trees. Those who know the terrain well know how much can be concealed here.
Camouflaged critters exploit psychology as …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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2/1/23
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A shoreline summer camp, the former site of an iconic lighthouse, a working sheep farm and over 1,000 feet of mainstem Minter Creek are among seven properties that two local land trusts worked to …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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2/1/23
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A robin pulls a worm from the lawn. A brief tension, released, and with a few tosses of the robin’s head the worm is gone.
Dawn on New Year’s Day. It’s my first bird of the year. …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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12/28/22
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I’m not sure how I see them. It is the most turbulent day of winter yet. Wind tears through the firs that surround Key Center. I scuttle across the highway and aim for Capitol Lumber, eyes …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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11/30/22
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Last month, writing about what to anticipate in our natural world, I pointed to the return of rain as one of September’s most important events. Hold on. That was two months ago. …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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10/27/22
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The fruit harvest will be low in home orchards across the Key Peninsula this year.
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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9/28/22
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“What pines? Where are these pines?” asked my birding friend after I mentioned I’d been getting to know western white pine, the forgotten conifer of our Key Peninsula forest.
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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9/28/22
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In 2018 the top broke off a tall Douglas fir and fell into YMCA Camp Seymour’s amphitheater, smashing several rows of benches and destroying the fire pit ring. No campers were present at the …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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8/31/22
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Welcome to September. Short and golden blaze the final days of summer. The atmosphere stirs. Chickadees, nuthatches, creepers and kinglets gather into acrobatic groups. Blackberries are again …
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Chris Rurik, KP News
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8/31/22
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