Home & Garden
The Beauty in Nature: Chimney Swifts
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
I remember walking along a sidewalk when I was 5 years old and hearing chattering overhead. Looking up, I saw a loose group of small birds flying swiftly.
Ants in Your House? How to Get Rid of Them Safely
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Most of us don’t want to share a home with ants, but we don’t want to douse the place with insecticide either.
Melinda’s Garden: Plant Alliums This Fall to Add Variety and Beauty to Your Garden
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- Written by Melinda Myers Melinda Myers
Take your garden to new heights with alliums. This ornamental member of the onion family provides welcome color as spring bulbs fade and before summer perennials fill our gardens with colorful blooms.
The Beauty in Nature: 2 Yellowjacket Wasps
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
By late summer, most of us have been pestered by yellowjackets at picnics, and some of us noticed the gray, football-sized paper nests of bald-faced hornets attached to twigs in trees.
The Beauty in Nature: Blooming Southern Trees
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
One sultry, moonlit July evening a few years ago, I enjoyed seeing, and smelling, the large, white blossoms on a 30-foot-tall southern magnolia tree on a southeastern Pennsylvania lawn.
The Beauty in Nature: Tree-Nesting Shorebirds
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
Solitary sandpipers and Bonaparte’s gulls are unusual shorebirds in their respective families.
Melinda’s Garden: Spring into the Growing Season
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- Written by Melinda Myers Melinda Myers
Spring-flowering bulbs and perennials are filling our landscapes with color.
The Beauty in Nature: Converging Birds and Horseshoe Crabs
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
In May of some years, I’ve traveled to Delaware Bay beaches in New Jersey and Delaware to experience the convergence of many thousands of spawning horseshoe crabs, nesting laughing gulls, and migrating shorebirds, including red knots, ruddy turnstones, dunlin, and semi-palmated sandpipers.
The Beauty in Nature: Peeping Peepers
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- Written by Clyde McMillan-Gamber Clyde McMillan-Gamber
I visit the shallows of certain ponds and wetlands in, and bordering, woods in southeastern Pennsylvania a couple evenings every April.