Across Northern Iowa's wetland strongholds, it's been an excellent production year for mallards, wood ducks, and hoodeds.  And although most folks aren't seeming to notice, Iowa coots have also enjoyed an excellent nesting season.  Coot broods are abundant, and most youngsters are now in the process of being "weaned" while they make the transition from
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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
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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
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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
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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
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  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
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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
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  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. 
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