Eclectic travelers

GOING NATURE’S WAY By Kate Crowley We have now officially said farewell to summer.  On September 23 rd the sun had moved far enough south that we had nearly equal hours of daylight and night time.  Now it’s just a gradual, but inevitable slide into the darkness (a bleak description I know).  I am already looking forward to December 21 st .   But as I thought about the change of season I wondered why and how we call this particular season, both Autumn and Fall; the only season that has two words to describe it. I had to do some research to satisfy my curiosity. Turns out that for most of recorded human history there was recognition of just two seasons – winter and summer, the exception being the Chinese who divided the year into what we now call spring and autumn.  The word ‘autumn’ is Latin in origin and was first used in the 14 th Century, replacing the term ‘harvest’. The use of Fall appears in the 16 th or 17 th century, depending on who you consult.  One of the first cita

inhabit.com WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley Black-billed magpies are one of my favorite birds, even though I have to travel west to see them in abundance.  But this column is not going to be all about magpies; it is going to be about cats, as you will see momentarily.  Last week I was in Bozeman, Montana visiting my son and his family and while my granddaughter Teagan and I were in the backyard, we suddenly heard the loud and excited calls of a magpie in their neighbor’s yard.  Jon’s dog, Paolo rushed towards the fence and I told Teagan there must be a cat out; both Paolo and the magpie knew it.  Their next door neighbor could probably be called a ‘cat’ lady.  She lives alone and has at least four cats, which she allows roam outside.  One of the reasons Jon built the fence that separates the two yards was to keep her cats from coming into his yard, but it hasn’t stopped them.  Cats can leap high and scale barriers. As the magpie continued to ‘yell’ I went up to the fence and t

WINGIN’ IT By Kate Crowley Every year about this time my birding thoughts are focused on migration. I can’t help it.  Everywhere I look; up, down and straight ahead I see birds in motion and I know that they are heading south. I admit to feeling a bit melancholy about this annual procession, because I know it’s going to be a long seven to eight months before we will see them again. Just how birds make this biannual trip remains in some ways as much as a mystery as it was for our ancestors.  We have developed different technologies that give us a great deal of information about the routes they follow, but just how they manage the journey continues to inspire researchers and amaze the rest of us. We know that for millennia before humans walked the earth birds have been flying between North and South America. They are called neotropical migrants and we know that they come up from the south in the spring because the food sources in the northern regions are so overly abundant at