Major Snowage

It’s here at last, and it hasn’t wasted any time settling in. I’m talking about West Michigan’s first real snowfall of the winter, which arrived Thursday night. Residents awakening on Friday morning opened their curtains and looked out the window at a landscape transformed.
We didn’t get just a little snow, either. I don’t know exactly [...]

Driving to Battle Creek

I was out and about with my camera, looking for things to photograph in a month of the year that doesn’t much stimulate my imagination, when my appetite began tapping on my shoulder, requesting to be fed. Smoked ribs came to mind, along with memories of a tiny mom-and-pop joint in Battle Creek that makes [...]

Sunset Theater

Saturday dawned blue and beautiful, filled with November haze and blessed with temperatures warmer than we’ve got any right to expect this time of year. It was a great day for a walk, and out at the W. K. Kellogg Experimental Forest southeast of Gull Lake in Kalamazoo County, people were seizing the opportunity.
I was [...]

Unless You’re a Deer Hunter

I have a theory and I’m about to prove it. But first, how many of you are deer hunters? Raise your hand.
Very good. Kindly exclude yourselves from the following poll.
As for the rest of you, how many are huge fans of November?
Hmmm…okay, let’s try that again: if you love the month of November, raise your [...]

Tom Turkey

Let me introduce you to a friend of mine. This is Tom, and he’s a real turkey.
I know that’s not a very nice thing to say about someone, but in Tom’s case, truer words were never spoken. Tom is the resident turkey of the small animal farm at Bowen’s Mills. He’s also about as nice [...]

Swan Song of the Leaves

This is the time of the last of the leaves. As I write, a deep low pressure center is moving out of northeast Minnesota into Ontario, dragging with it a steamy plume of unseasonably warm, moist air and high winds across the Great Lakes region. It is the inevitable leaf-stripper of late October that denudes [...]

Battlefield at Bowen’s Mills

Call me superstitious, but I feel unlucky whenever a cannon is pointed directly at me. So I felt glad when they turned this one downfield, where the Southern army was massing it’s forces—all twenty of them, from what I could judge. Granted, it wasn’t much of a massing, but it’s hard to muster up Confederate [...]

As the Green Months End

If April is the beginning of Michigan’s green season, September is the beginning of the end. Like April, it is a season of contrasts. But the contrasts are gentler contrasts—not an explosion but an implosion, a graceful fading of summer heat into cooler temperatures, long days into early sunsets, and the lush emerald of the [...]

The River Otters of Fishtown

Let me admit it up front: my otter images are not the best photos I’ve ever taken.
On the other hand, they’re the only otter photos I’ve ever taken, because until now, I’ve never seen otters up close. In fact, until this spring, when I caught a momentary glimpse of one along the Coldwater River, I [...]

Sundown at Sleeping Bear

Along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, from near Gary, Indiana, all the way north to Wilderness State Park west of the Mackinac Bridge, stretches a far-reaching ribbon of white, windblown dunes. Piled high by the prevailing westerlies blowing off the big lake, these great sand mountains are a hallmark of Michigan’s west coast.
Warren Dunes, [...]

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