Sylvan and Nocturnal

It’s twilight now up on the Allegheny Front. As I begin to write something I can still see words taking shape on the page without a light but that won’t last. I might be able to see better elsewhere in the forest but here below tall hemlocks and red spruces, it’s dark. Owls have already […]

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I Love NY

I love to watch the season change late every year and there’s nowhere better to watch this than the state of New York. It’s overlooked as an outdoorsman’s paradise, I think. I’ve lived all over the east and I believe this to be true. If there were no further considerations than outdoors possibilities, I would […]

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Suburban Hunter-Gatherer

Where I live right now, while I’m not in the woods, is a paved place in general. There’s a lot of asphalt. McKnight road, one of the major high-speed and high noise conduits of Pittsburgh’s North Hills passes within sight, it’s roar permeating all till long after dark. Businesses have proliferated here and I can […]

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Quiet Little Places

The chipmunks that live down the hill count on me to launch peanuts daily from the back porch. A bit further out I can see parking lots, a highway and a shopping center but there’s a strip of woods here and it’s home for an assortment of animals, great and small. Even my porch hosts […]

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Big Fish (of Scale)

Finding big fish isn’t easy and catching them is even harder. I’ve fished a good deal over the last 34 years or so and I’ve very seldom caught a really big fish, and by “big fish” I mean a fish that is at least half as large as the species will potentially grow. I have […]

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A Well-Rounded Outdoorsman

A couple of days ago I found myself in an outfitter’s canoe transport van, eavesdropping for just a moment on the bearded outdoorsmen in the seats behind me. Like myself, they were on the way upriver for a day of floating and fishing the Conemaugh River – a new place for me. At the moment […]

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welcoming fall

    Autumn’s come early to the northeast this year or at least to Pennsylvania. As a lover of cold weather, I’m thrilled to see it. How do I know fall’s come early? Well, obviously, the daily highs have been significantly below what I can remember from recent years around the beginning of September. That’s […]

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Bionomics – A Book Report

    During the later years of the Eastern Brook Trout Solo Adventure, I thought I caught sight of something that looked like a self-regulating economy among the organisms of the eastern forest. And by the time I was done, it seemed odd to try to fit the strictures of command-and-control governmental policy to a […]

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