outdoors

West Fargo ice skaters won’t necessarily have to lace up in their cars this winter. The West Fargo Parks District, in conjunction with JLG Architects of Fargo, is currently building warming houses next to the skating rinks at Maplewood and Park for skaters and sledders. The two...

My butternut squash froze last weekend. Sunday morning I woke up to find my thermometer reading 34 degrees but it sits a few feet above the ground. At ground level, however, a distinctive hoary-white coating blanketed the grass next to the meandering squash vine, which also sported...

In any culture there is a segment of the population that goes about its business unnoticed—or at least underappreciated--by the rest. It consists of the workers and toilers quietly but diligently doing work integral to the function of society. It might be the garbage collector,...

My earliest memory of western grebes (Aechmophorus occidentalis) comes not from personal observation but rather from television in the late 1960s. I recall being a rather young child and watching film footage of the spectacular courtship dance of these dynamic water birds. It could...

I would sincerely love to relay how fellow West Fargo birder, Dean Riemer and I drove two hours to a wooded tract in northwestern Minnesota last Sunday and relocated a rare northern owl. But I can’t. We whiffed on it. There were early hints that this might be a winter to be on the...

If we were to conduct a poll asking people what their favorite literary genre is, we'd get answers all over the chart from science fiction to European history. There's a reason Barnes and Noble carries so many titles, it caters to a reading public with extremely diverse interests....

Everyone seems to relish in the annual practice of reviewing the previous 12 months when late December rolls around. It's a nearly sacred rite in some media circles. In the event, dear reader, you are not yet fully exhausted by this, allow me to point out the year's birding highlights...

The potluck dinner was finished, most had already exited into the frosty still air last Saturday when I, too, thanked our hostess and made my way to the car, still scratching my head in awe. How had we done it? Indeed, a loose-knit group of area birdwatchers had gone out that day...

Not surprisingly, the most recent issue of Living Bird News features a bird photograph on its cover, two birds actually. Captured by photographer Tim Laman, the stunning shot depicts a pair of twelve-wired birds-of-paradise. The male's upper half is a resplendent jet black, the rest...

Every once in a while, a keen observer will spot an obvious flaw in the seemingly error-free world of bird morphology. Maybe it's a missing toe or eye. Sometimes it's a feather colored differently than the rest or a wing that can no longer support flight. The sources of such deviations...

Early November, the time of year when things in the world of birding are waning considerably. Nothing is nesting, very few birds are singing, and the diversity of species has fallen precipitously from even a month ago. The days of seeing 100+ species in an outing are behind us, now...

Certain groups of birds seem to invite a degree of lumping by the public when it comes to their descriptions. It's not to fault observers necessarily;...

I'm typically not a person to sit still when it comes to being in the out-of-doors. Fly-fishing was a sport which occupied a significant portion of my personal time earlier in life. Rare was the instance when I wasn't continually working up or down a river. So it is with birding;...