Tomorrow is yard waste pick up day for my community, the last of three pick up dates. For the last couple days our hearing has been assaulted by the many […]

I found a colorful and fairly large spider while removing the stump from the mulberry in my yard. This is the same mulberry I wrote about earlier this year. (http://www.mercersmusings.com/2017/06/14/mulberry-is-open-for-business/) […]

“You should see  the crows out here!” my wife, Eileen exclaimed. “It is like the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds.” Sure enough, out along the back edge of our property […]

Life brings little pleasures! The other day, Eileen and I took a hike up into Miller Canyon looking for birds. We arrived shortly after sunrise and trekked up to a […]

Two times this week I had the pleasure of joining some great naturalists out in Delhaas Woods. The first time was for the North American Butterfly Association’s annual butterfly census. […]

Once I realized that multiple species used my tiny backyard, I became obsessed with know which was which. There are only a limited number of local species I needed to […]

On June 28, I heard the first cicada of the year (FOY). It gave a single call. The next day, I heard one more call in the middle of the […]

On June 29, as I walked through my yard, I noticed the wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius Maxim.) were about to ripen. In fact, several of them had been eaten. Wineberries are […]

This is the second part of my blogs on butterfly and their scientific names. For those of you who like my blogs to be stories, think of this as the […]

Summer is the time of butterflies and moths. Any sunny day, these sprites can be seen visiting our garden. As I learned the common and scientific names, I became curious […]