Everywhere you look in Jacksonville you see Canada geese. They saunter leisurely across the street right in front of your car. Honk at them and they pay no attention. There are also alligators in Jacksonville but we don’t see nearly as many of them as Canada geese. When a gator does wander into an urban …
Category Archives: Wildlife
Ducks ducks ducks and more ducks
Clouds of ducks taking off from the Lone Oak Duck Club in western Missouri. Probably mostly mallards with a few shovelers, gadwalls and teal. But this video was taken in FEBRUARY! Where were they in November and December?? The guys worked hard all summer creating good waterfowl habitat and I’m glad the birds can use …
Kansas Wildlife & Parks magazine
This is my first Way Outside cartoon for Kansas Wildlife & Parks magazine. July/August 1998. If my math is right…and it sometimes isn’t…2022 will start my twenty-fourth year working with this wonderful publication. I’m thankful that then-Editor Mike Miller took a chance on me and did something goofy and I’m blessed that when current Editor …
Say you were a duck…
Say you were a duck… flying along… just looking for a nice place to eat… and you saw a place like this, wouldn’t you lock up and cruise right in? That’s apparently what this mallard drake did when he spotted the Lone Oak Duck Club. Maybe the guys down below in the duck blind should …
Forbidden love in the woods
Fast food from the farm
The annual early teal season is usually a total crap shoot. At least it is at the Lone Oak Duck Club in western Missouri. Sometimes the little speedsters have come and gone before the season opens. Other times they’re still up north. The table is setNo need to brush a blind. Just hunker down in …
Two big Kansas whitetails
Think these two big guys will make it through hunting season? If they stay nocturnal they just might. But if they start thinking with their gonads they’ll both wind up on the wall of some guy’s mancave.
Big Fishweir Creek
While eating lunch on the deck at Harp’s Pub, which is only a few thousand yards from my house, you can look straight down into the murky waters of Big Fishweir Creek. This once navigable urban waterway meanders from Jacksonville’s trendy Avondale neighborhood under the Herschel Street bridge and into the Ortega River where it …
Florida Black Bears
A recent Associated Press article in the Florida Times Union States that Governor Ron Desantis signed a bill to protect black bears against poachers. I don’t even like poached eggs so I can imagine how yucky a poached bear would taste. Anyway, the main reason some people were poaching bears is because the Florida bear …
Pets by day, killers by night
They stalk the suburbs by night. With catlike quickness they pounce upon their unsuspecting prey. With no respect for the concept of fair play the nocturnal monsters toy with their helpless victims, often flinging them into the air or swatting them with cruel paws. Eventually tiring of this sadistic game, they commit the unthinkable… they …