Ever wonder why there are so many deer in Virginia? When a doe has four at a time, it’s easy to see how there are now over a million animals in our fair state. My buddy, Chris Johnson, sent me this picture of a mother deer with four little ones resting in the shade. With quadruplets, she certainly has her hands (hooves) full. Jimmy Graves of Graves Mountain Lodge told me not long ago … [Read more...]

“Bob white! Bob-bob-white!” That’s a call very few hear anymore. It’s the call of a male quail in the spring, searching for a lady friend. Unfortunately, there are very few quail remaining, but my daughter Angelin recently sent me an audio of a quail whistling behind her house in Adams Farm, a suburb of Greensboro. Nearby are some fallow fields (awaiting development) and somehow a few quail have … [Read more...]

  Some unexpected visitors appeared in our back yard this week – about 25 or 30 of them and they went skinny dipping in our goldfish pond. It was a large flock of Cedar Waxwings and what beauties! I have been seeing Cedar Waxwings in the last few years, but only passing through. I see them along about this time of year and again in mid-fall. I suppose they migrate through this … [Read more...]

  I had never eaten a morel until my old friend Carl Oakes asked if I wanted a few. Not wanting to offend, I said, “Sure”, but I had no idea what they were or what to do with the strange looking spores. Later I found out that morels, wild mushrooms, were mountain delicacies and highly desirable. On several occasions since then, I have taken to the hills and picked them myself. … [Read more...]

  I am still enjoying my Christmas tree. Really. No, it’s not decorated and clad in lights and ornaments. It’s a little, brown, actually, and sitting beside our patio firepit. I clip off the dry branches and limbs, put them in the bottom of the firepit when I’m ready for a fire, light it with a piece of newspaper and “Whoosh!” It’s up in flames. The dried branches and twigs make … [Read more...]

My daughter, Angelin, gave me a birdhouse made of moss for Christmas. I thought at first it was a gag gift. It looks like it once belonged to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I put it in the shed. This week, I remembered it, drug it out and hung it on a Shepherd’s Crook with a baffle. The house may look weird, but it has some extraordinary features. The house is made of wicker and green moss … [Read more...]

Nancy gave me a soil testing kit for my garden two Christmases ago, but like most things with more than one page of instructions, it went directly to the basement to spend its life waiting for someone who didn’t flunk Organic Chemistry in college. My son Jimmie was home last weekend, dug up the kit and tested the soil in my garden. It turns out the soil was slightly acidic, and the nitrogen and … [Read more...]

I planted a Christmas Tree in my garden last week. Well, I didn’t plant it so much as I drug it out of the living room, out into the back yard and tossed it into my garden to sit a spell. In the meantime, I heated an old jar of peanut butter in the microwave, then poured it on the drying branches of the tree and sprinkled bird seed on top. I have now converted our old Christmas Tree into a new … [Read more...]

  By Dr. Leonard Lee Rue III   When I wrote my book, The Deer of North America, in 1978, I had already been studying deer for 39 years and had taken thousands of photographs of them.  I have over 17,000 reference books in my personal library and I read 486 books and biological reports on deer in order make my own book as complete as possible.  One of the reports, in the Journal … [Read more...]

  (Quail populations are down by over 80% since the 1960s. Some have given up all hope of their return, but others are taking action, as described below.)   By Marie Majarov   Landowners and neighbors in rural western Frederick County dearly missed the once-frequent “bob-WHITE” whistle and coveys of northern bobwhite, our native Virginia quail scurrying across their … [Read more...]