I just pulled my latest issue of TIME magazine out of the mail box.  This week's cover story is a piece titled: A World Without Bees.  Written by Bryan Walsh, the article deals with the importance of bees to agriculture and focuses on the ongoing mystery of widespread Colony Collapse Disorder.  According to Walsh, pollination by
Read More

This year's waterfowl production has been excellent across North Central Iowa and broods are abundant wherever you find thick vegetation.  Increased water levels and plant growth has also been good for the production of aquatic insects, frogs, toads, and fish.  Wading birds are currently capitalizing on the newly expanded fishing opportunities.  While hunkered in to
Read More

It's late summer and the Iowa prairie is flourishing with  a dazzling array of life and color.   Although impossible for contemporary Iowans to fathom the endless, horizon to horizon prairie vistas that greeted European immigrants as they rushed westward into Iowa during the 1830s and 1840s, today's grassland remnants and ongoing prairie restorations do provide the
Read More

Subtle Transitions.        It's early August, and Iowa's woodlands are hinting of change.  The stunning lime colored brilliance of earlier forest greenery has slowly given way to the darker, more subdued hues of late summer.  Early season berries are but a memory, while the fruit of late season species are currently transitioning from the green
Read More

  For those of us who enjoy breathing fresh oxygen --- as opposed to inhaling from an atmosphere composed largely of stifling, super heated, atomized water vapor --- the past few days have offered the most brutal week of summer weather so far.  On most mornings, sunrise dew points were excruciatingly high as humidity readings measured anywhere from the mid-eighties
Read More

By Lowell Washburn - By the time July rolls around, I'm not usually spending very much time in the timber --way too much heat and way too much humidity for my liking.  But North Iowa's crack of dawn temperatures have been amazingly tolerable this week.  Heading out well before dawn this morning, I decided to try and find one last
Read More

  Human preschool students are not the only recipients of early education.  The attached photo provides a good example.  The breeze was swirling and, although she caught my scent, this white-tail doe could not pinpoint my exact location.  Her reaction was one that every bow hunter has witnessed far too often -- the dreaded foot stomp. 
Read More