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We have been advocates of increasing the time that children spend outdoors rather than staring at a phone screen.  Our interest in this subject was sparked by attending a live lecture based on the work of Children and Nature Network.   Alongside this, after publishing the book Unstructured Time, we became more observant of children as they encounter the outdoors. Always, its amazing what you see when you look. So, on this gray day in January we decided that we were in need of some outdoor exposure, being concerned with the ills of cabin fever. Now, cabin fever is not terminal but it sure seems like sometimes it could lead to that.  W e decided to take some of our own advice about the outdoors and head for the woods. Since we're always interested in exploring new areas we decided to head for Lockhart State Park which is only about 30 minutes away.   Although this park is so close to where we live, we have never visited this park and so not only do we get t...

Here it is, January and it is now the beginning of so called cedar fever season.  Cedar is our central Texas evergreen which is not a cedar but a juniper.  But, we call junipers cedars because that is what we have called them for hundreds of years despite the fact that we all know them to be junipers.  We could not change our vocabulary now because too many phrases depend on the cedar wording. The newspapers publish on a daily basis the pollen count in ambient air to make sure that those who are not subject to cedar fever can blame their feeling bad on cedar fever without the risk of being criticized for being a hypochondriac. No matter what, allergies to cedar ---ooops---juniper pollen is a serious thing to many people.   We know of people who have moved from the area specifically because of their allergic reaction to the pollen---running nose, coughing, headaches, etc. Old timers say that the way to cure yourself from this allergy is to eat only a few of the sma...

The history of the Annual Christmas Bird Count is interesting for how it was a way to shift from annual contests of how many birds could be killed to how many birds can be counted.  So, for many years now, volunteers have been conducting bird counts in late December.  The count is conducted on the same day across broad parts of the country.  The 1600 acres which make up our community has been in the bird counting area for the last three years.  There is some fluctuations of the numbers of birds as well as the numbers of species. Below is the summary of the data for the last three years:                                                               2019       2018     2017 Number of Species                            ...