The last installment of “The Naturalist’s Corner” began kind of tongue-in-cheek, referring to climate change in Trumpian terms of a global hoax. But climate change is no hoax and it’s not amusing… it is deadly serious. I ended the last column talking about the alarming rate of sea level rise over the last century, “ … global sea level rose nearly 8 inches in the last 100 years or so and the rate of sea level rise has nearly doubled in the last two decades and has been rising every year.”

I’m sure many can remember what President Donald J. Trump, a legend in his own mind, has had to say about climate change, i.e., anthropocentric global warming. 

My bride and I celebrated our anniversary by ditching the kids and renting a cabin near Blue Ridge, Ga., for the weekend. 

I started out the front door, in the early morning light the other day, to check on the whereabouts of our newest family member Remi, a young part Shar-Pei mix we adopted from the shelter last May. Remi has recently decided when she goes out in the morning part of her doggy-duty is to go down the road to our neighbor’s house and bark, and we’ve been trying to convince her that’s really not necessary. While I was focused on Remi, trying to make sure I caught up with her before she had time to make her morning announcements I couldn’t help but notice the incandescent red glow coming from the dappled woods.

Around 70 percent of the birds that nest in the Eastern U.S. are neotropical migrants — they nest here (U.S. and Canada) and overwinter in Mexico and/or Central and South America. There are around 200 species of neotropical migrants and many make extensive journeys. Shorebirds nesting in the arctic tundra and northern Canada have the longest migration. Species like red knots and white-rumped sandpipers may travel 10,000 miles between nesting and wintering grounds. Long distance migrants that nest in our area include red-eyed vireos, barn swallows, cerulean warblers, scarlet tanagers and more.

Our annual beach and marsh R&R at Wild Dunes on Isle of Palms, South Carolina, is history. Thanks to the generosity of dear friends we have been making the trip for a decade or so. It has become the high point of our summer and it never disappoints — but how could it, with wonderful beach and marsh access. 

Studying the red wolf fiasco taking place in eastern North Carolina takes me far away in time and distance — back to northeastern Louisiana in December 1969. 

I was 18 years old, sitting in a deer stand on the last day of season. It was a cold morning with a light breeze blowing a wispy fog around. My view would be clear one moment then shrouded in fog the next. It was a melancholy kind of morning as I looked out across a bulldozed clearcut to a small 800-acre patch of woods thinking this patch and a few more like it were all that was left of hundreds of square miles of wilderness that was once Beouf River swamp.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife (F&W) held a public meeting regarding proposed rule changes to its Red Wolf Recovery Plan. According to Defenders of Wildlife’s Ben Prater, this public meeting echoed most of the other polls and/or comment periods regarding the recovery plan.

“Of the 22 people who spoke only two were opposed to the red wolf program,” Prater noted.

On June 27 U.S. Fish and Wildlife (F&W) announced a proposed rule many in the conservation forefront have deemed as basically a death sentence for any wild red wolves residing in eastern North Carolina. This would be the second time in recent history the red wolf has officially been declared extinct in the wild.

This past spring was one of the more trying ones with regard to my annual U.S. Forest Service bird point survey. The survey runs each year from May 1 to June 15. You might have noticed it rained a bit in May. Of course, one can’t count in the rain, but according to protocol if it’s not raining counts may be conducted and this spring there were days I birded just after and just before rains. One thing I thought I noticed — on mornings with heavy cloud cover, especially those mornings where it had rained before dawn, birds were much quieter than normal.