2012-02-06 15:47:00
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It was well after midnight and a cold wind blew as the three predator hunters pulled into the Manor Township farm field, their seventh "set" on a night that began at 8 o'clock. Careful not to slam the doors on the van, the three swung silently into action. Twelve-year-old Corey Rineer slung ......
2012-01-30 14:45:00
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For a smitten birdwatcher, this time of year can be agony. Birds' territorial singing is long gone. The fall hawk watches are over. The great migration back north is not yet at hand. That's not the main reason Greg Grove, a Huntingdon County birdwatcher, came up with the idea of a Penns......
2012-01-23 14:48:00
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WEIKERT, Union County — As the fire pops and embers sail into the starry night, Harry Smith floats his theory to cure the world, by no means merely in jest. It goes something like this: If everyone would be required to backpack for at least one week a year and own a bicycle, there woul......
2012-01-16 16:48:00
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You won't find members of Lancaster County's only environmental group staging tree-sitting protests or engaging in "ecotage." But the volunteer-driven Sierra Club-Lancaster Group is finding ways to quietly improve the local environment while enjoying the heck out of it at the same time....
2012-01-09 15:55:00
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Dorothy Parker still vividly remembers the day she happened to look out the window of the family's North President Avenue home to see her 4-year-old son, Ted, calling to the birds. "He heard the birds singing." she picks up the story. "Evidently he was trying to make the same sounds. I looke......
2012-01-02 15:04:00
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Someday, Ray and Mary Lou Good figure they will no longer be up to making the long trip from Intercourse to their beloved mountain cabin in Tioga County. When that day comes, all they will have to do to continue their mountain living is walk downstairs. After seven years of learning by ......
2011-12-27 17:59:00
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You may or may not have noticed how much of the English language is enlivened with active verbs and expressions that derive from nature, animals and hunting. You wing it. You may act crazy as a loon or ham it up. Perhaps you pass the buck. The references are everywhere. Let's take a loo......
2011-12-20 10:11:00
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The first-ever regulated trapping season for wolves is under way in Idaho. Some 500 trappers are trying to outsmart one of the most wary predators on earth. The first trapper to succeed is from Pennsylvania. George Mohr of Mount Joy to be precise. Mohr, 53, a self-employed con......
2011-12-12 15:22:00
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What with all the scary headlines about accidental shootings, hunters falling out of tree stands and heart attacks each deer season in Pennsylvania, you might be inclined to wonder: Just how dangerous is this sport, anyway.
If you click on a running tally of hunting accident news reports ......
2011-12-05 14:36:00
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It would be a logical assumption to say walking is in Lew Jury's blood. After all, at 73, he walks almost every day four to nine miles. And for the last four years, he's journeyed "across the pond" to England and Wales for three weeks of perambulating through moors, seaside cliffs, she......
2011-11-28 15:10:00
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WARDENSVILLE, W. Va. — Just so you know going into this deer-hunting column, be advised that you will not read about any large-racked bucks ending up on the deer pole. In fact, if you follow my experiences in the woods of West Virginia during the first three days of the Mountain State'......
2011-11-21 17:32:00
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The crow snowbirds arrived back in Lancaster early this year, beating the Thanksgiving rush. But they're mostly all here now, 10,000 to 15,000 strong, and volunteers are once again setting off bangers and screamers to herd them to roosting areas that both the crows and people can countenance.......
2011-11-14 15:42:00
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If you are a rock climber in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware, you have an early Christmas present: the Safe Harbor South cliffs are again open. After about 15 years of agonizing closure, the slabby, nearly vertical, up to 100-feet-high cliffs along the Susquehanna River just ......
2011-11-07 16:34:00
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It was at a gathering of university biologists from Pennsylvania in late 2008 that Millersville University's Dr. John R. Wallace first learned that the state would be ground zero for the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom. The aquatic ecologist remembers how stunned he and his colleagues were ......
2011-10-31 14:36:00
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I take some comfort that there are still a few places in Lancaster County where people can still get lost. Muddy Run Recreation Park is one. It may be a park. Its boundary is entirely surrounded by a fence. In its heart is a 100-acre lake. But each year, park manager Dave Bye......
2011-10-24 16:08:00
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Marylou Barton has this fantasy. Ten years from now, when you drive through Manheim Township, there won't be as many lawnmowers sputtering on a Saturday afternoon. Instead, lawns may be more like meadows than manicured yards. You'll see more birds than you do now. And butterflies flutte......
2011-10-17 17:08:00
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When Rob Mies hoists up Kamilah at the end of his traveling bat show and the straw-colored flying fox bat unfurls its nearly 6-foot wingspan while hanging upside down, interesting things often happen. There are usually gasps, some of them by suddenly uneasy audience members. A sprinkling of ......
2011-10-10 14:20:00
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The storms giveth and the storms taketh away. A Lancaster County stream may erode its banks and maybe even change course slightly over time. But rarely is the geography of Lancaster County altered in modern times to the extent that's occurring right now in the Susquehanna River, just of......
2011-10-03 14:15:00
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There is a spot overlooking a ravine in Tiadaghton State Forest where Bob Kutz was taken by his father when he began deer hunting. Kutz's father had been shown the special place by Kutz's grandfather. Kutz, 68, of East Hempfield Township, has taken some 20 deer and a few turkeys from t......
2011-09-26 16:30:00
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Recent flooding will mean Pennsylvania hunters will see fewer stocked pheasants when the season opens Oct. 22. The Pennsylvania Game Commission reported Monday that about 40,000 birds perished in floodwater from Tropical Storm Lee or escaped at the agency's Loyalsock and Northcentral game fa......
2011-09-26 16:15:00
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The map on the screen showed the Cedar Run area of Pennsylvania's Pine Creek Gorge. It's one of Pennsylvania's finest mountain trout streams and one fished at one time or another by about half the 50 or so members of the local Donegal Chapter of Trout Unlimited in attendance. All those dots ......
2011-09-19 15:00:00
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WAYNESBORO, Va. — I am sitting under a lone walnut tree tucked under a rise on an old Virginia farm. It's the only spot my Dad would sit during 25 years of hunting doves on early fall afternoons. Since being struck by lightning, the tree has lost all its leaves, but still ha......
2011-09-12 15:07:00
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The last time I heard the whistle of a bobwhite quail calling its own name in Lancaster County was at least 20 years ago. I was hiking through tall grass in a long-deserted farm that had become part of the Muddy Run pumped-storage reservoir project. I stopped......
2011-09-05 16:00:00
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What do you do if your daughter comes to you, inspired by a movie she just saw, and wants to form a club — in a treehouse? You have only a small yard behind a Lancaster city row home, no clubhouse, not even a tree. In this case, 10-year-old Dulce Zeager was lucky en......
2011-08-29 18:14:00
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When Roger Stoner was getting into birdwatching, he remembers being initially hesitant to join the Lancaster County Bird Club and go on field trips.
He was afraid he didn't know enough about birds and would feel out of place.
That's one reason Stoner is leading the club's new "Bir......
2011-08-15 15:29:00
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"Unfortunately, eels have suffered because they don't look like other fish," American eel researcher Steve Minkkinen is saying. "They look like a snake and people do have a negative opinion of them." Certainly, it didn't used to be that way. Here in Lancaster County, buil......
2011-08-08 17:00:00
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SOUTH MOUNTAIN, Cumberland County — "Ad, I think he's between you and me." So, since Jim Chestney is about 10 feet from me, that means that Elvis, the largest timber rattlesnake ever seen on South Mountain, is lying (coiling?) somewhere under the blueberries only a few steps away....
2011-08-01 13:52:00
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Does the precipitous disappearance of Pennsylvania's bats to deadly white-nose syndrome and wind turbines make a difference in people's lives? You bet it does. Take Cal Butchkowski. A couple years ago, he and his family could lounge around their wooded backyard on the edge o......
2011-08-01 13:43:00
Ad Crable
A pair of peregrine falcons has again hatched two eyases (young falcons) under the Route 462 bridge between Columbia and Wrightsville. These two eyases, both females, were discovered and banded July 27 by a team of volunteers led by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Last summer, the sam......
2011-07-25 12:55:00
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About 20 years ago, Susanna Roland saw a magazine photo of a wood duck. "I thought, 'Oh my gosh, what a beautiful duck,' " recalls Roland, a 49-year-old amateur photographer from New Holland. Thus began a two-decade love affair and stalking of Pennsylvania's second-most-common duck, aft......
2011-07-18 14:45:00
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If you set out to create an ecologically diverse landscape in Lancaster County populated by native species friendly to wildlife, would you think of that expansive suburbia known as Manheim Township? Why not? That would be the reply of an energetic and determined grassroots group called Habit......
2011-07-11 13:57:00
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AKUMAL, Mexico — She is in a pit 3 feet deep and as long as a coffin when we are allowed to approach at 10:30 p.m. It is easy to find her. When she crawls out of the sea — at night when it is safest — the 500-pound green turtle gouges the white sand and leaves a wide, rutte......
2011-07-04 20:09:00
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Dave Eichler knew how steeping young people in outdoors adventures could instill confidence, humility, self reliance and other what he calls "soft skills" no other class at Donegal High School would.
But facing Donegal School Board members around a round table in 1991, he was peppered wit......
2011-06-27 14:20:00
CINDY HUMMEL
A shared love of fly fishing recently brought together 13-year-old Grayson Hirst of West Lampeter Township and former President Jimmy Carter on Pennsylvania's fabled Spruce Creek. Over a Memorial Day outing on the wild trout stream near State College, Carter regaled Hirst with tales of his f......
2011-06-20 15:06:00
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Two emotional issues that could profoundly change the face of hunting in Pennsylvania — hunting on Sundays and a ban on live bird shoots — are moving through the legislature. Neither issue is new. But what is new is that both have garnered decidedly more support this year a......
2011-06-13 16:52:00
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Another spring, another disappointing showing in the frustrating effort to restore migratory American shad to the Susquehanna River where it was once but may not be future king. But the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission isn't giving up. It's pushing hard on two new fronts to get the rest......
2011-06-06 15:00:00
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You don't have to journey to Central America to experience a treetop canopy tour on a zip line. Go no farther away than northern Lancaster County, to be exact. That's where you'll find Refreshing Mountain Camp's Zip Line Canopy Tour, now in its second year. On the re......
2011-05-30 20:03:00
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It was maddening. It was incredibly exciting. Every time Jim Hamill and I moved to a new spot in the woods on Texter Mountain in West Cocalico Township last Wednesday morning, the gobbler would answer our entreaties with a thunderous gobble. But after 90 minutes, it became clear that th......
2011-05-23 17:04:00
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The phone call or e-mail will go typically like this: "We have relatives coming in for the weekend. Where would be a good place to take them hiking within anhour of Lancaster?"
I often have favorite hikes I pass along, but it's long been frustrating not being able to refer people to a one......
2011-05-16 14:46:00
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Every other day since March 1, a searcher has walked a grid pattern under the two new wind turbines on Turkey Hill, looking for the carcasses of birds that may have been killed by the turning blades. So, have there been any bats, tundra swans, birds of prey or endangered songb......
2011-05-09 16:02:00
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Leonard Green knew no one when he arrived at Bainbridge Community Park last Friday morning. But the 48-year-old soldier from Harrisburg, carrying injuries from mortar attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq, received a hero's welcome from the moment he and his cane gingerly exite......
2011-05-02 15:18:00
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SUEDBERG, Schuylkill County — "Yeah, they're going to be singing tonight," says Eric Miller, staring impatiently at his watch, waiting for dusk to descend. We are standing on the old railroad bed of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad that traces Swatara Creek where it sq......
2011-04-25 14:52:00
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The last time I took a hammock on a camping trip, it was one of those cheap string ones you can bunch inside your fist. I hung it with rope between two trees and climbed in to lounge around until it was time to retire to the tent and sleeping bag unfurled on a thick mattress pad. The tw......
2011-04-18 14:53:00
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Wildlife rehabilitator Deb Welter sees it every year around this time. People call her Malvern home. We have a shoebox filled with baby rabbits. They were found in the yard. We watched all day but no adult rabbit showed up. You need to take care of the poor little orphans. "Basically, w......
2011-04-11 16:06:00
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The hottest trend in climbing happens not on places like Chickies Rock, but on boulders sometimes no taller than a large sport utility vehicle.
It's called bouldering and one of the best playgrounds in the Mid-Atlantic may be found in a boulder field in a grove of trees in northwest......
2011-04-04 14:31:00
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Angering anglers along the way, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission may halt fishing for smallmouth bass during the spawn and extend catch-and-release-only fishing up tributaries to the "sick" portions of the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers. The proposals are the latest moves by an agen......
2011-03-28 15:13:00
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Don't worry, the VCU-Butler University basketball contest of underdogs doesn't tip off until 6:09 p.m. Saturday. Even if you consider that must-see TV, there will still be plenty of time to bring home a full stringer of fish on Lancaster County's opening day of trout season. The county, of c......
2011-03-21 16:42:00
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A surprising thing happened to a Chester County man recently during a trip to Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area to see the annual spring spectacle of tens of thousands of migrating snow geese and tundra swans. On the way home, in a stubble field near Blainsport, just north of Reinholds, ......
2011-03-14 16:00:00
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BURNHAM, Mifflin County — Greg Turner removes a heavy metal bar from the vandal-proof gate and eases his lanky body through a small opening and into the Mount Rock limestone cave. Just over two years ago, the Pennsylvania Game Commission wildlife biologist and a Bucknell University res......
2011-03-07 16:03:00
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Darn, we're outdoors and it's still not raining. How often do you think that on a March night? You do if you're out checking seasonal pools of water for the opening wave of migrating spotted salamanders, wood frogs and spring peepers. The first warm nights of late February and earl......
2011-02-28 16:13:00
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HAMBURG — For an unabashed winter hugger, I have been especially homebound this season. So I found myself yearning for a good immersion in the elements for my annual winter backpacking trip. I was worried, though, that waiting this long into winter might serve up a dud — onl......
2011-02-21 20:17:00
AD CRABLE
You've been hearing about it for nearly four years now: eight islands and some 3,414 mostly wooded acres of River Hills on both sides of the Susquehanna River owned by PPL to be protected for public use forever.
It's been slow in coming, getting this precious land in Lancaster and York co......
2011-02-14 14:16:00
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Unlike most states, anyone willing to shell out $50 to $100 can go to a reptile show or pet store in Pennsylvania and take home their own wide-eyed 6-inch American alligator hatchling to amaze friends. Jesse Rothacker of Manheim sees the sad end result of many of these impulse purchases....
2011-02-07 12:33:00
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Responding to complaints from hunters and farmers, the Pennsylvania Game Commission last week gave preliminary approval to stripping porcupines of their protected status. It appears the state's second-largest rodent, which is expanding its population in Pennsylvania, will become fair g......
2011-02-07 12:30:00
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Did last winter's extended mantle of deep snow in parts of Pennsylvania kill significant numbers of deer and contribute to a poor deer kill this year? Even though we won't see the harvest figures from the Pennsylvania Game Commission before April, it will be a hard question to answer in term......
2011-02-01 09:30:00
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When John Lash, a new acquaintance in my hunting grounds in West Virginia, invited me on a grouse hunt a couple months ago, it awakened long-dormant stirrings of nostalgia.
It rekindled memories of trying to keep up with my father and his friends and their dogs as they hunted ruffed grous......
2011-01-24 16:00:00
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All that trash buried at the Lancaster County landfill isn't pushing up daisies. It's growing something even more valuable to some species of wildlife: year-round grasses. The closed and capped Creswell Landfill in Manor Township has some of the most extensive and desirable grassland ha......
2011-01-17 17:10:00
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When Lisa Ward went to Penn State, she'd never swung an ax.
The Washington Boro native graduated last fall a proud Penn State Lumberjill.
The 2006 graduate of Penn Manor High School caught on quickly, sending wood chips and sawdust flying in helping the Penn State Woodsmen Team to......
2011-01-10 14:30:00
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One of the biggest wildlife restoration success stories in Pennsylvania history is about to get even better.
Shocking even the biggest dreamers, the Pennsylvania Game Commission is expected next year to remove the "threatened" status of bald eagles and declare the iconic bird of prey reco......
2011-01-03 16:12:00
AD CRABLE
Large regional parks where hiking and nature are the focus don't grow on trees these days.
But nature lovers found one under the Christmas tree a few weeks ago with the opening of the 569-acre Wolf's Hollow County Park along the Lancaster-Chester county line, a few miles south of Christia......
2010-12-27 13:13:00
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A boy or girl hunter's first deer etches a lifelong memory.
But few have to overcome the obstacles put in the way of 14-year-old Jonathan Price, even before the Columbia teen could take a shot.
Price is autistic and has pervasive developmental disorder, disabilities that present l......
2010-12-20 13:42:00
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"Excuse me, excuse me. Let go!" Maya Wilson says in mock earnestness to the small clump of black and gray feathers whose neck is clasped between two of her fingers.
She says this because the bird's surprisingly strong beak is clamped to her finger on a ridgetop of the Millport Conservancy......
2010-12-07 13:47:00
AD CRABLE
Preliminary figures show 3,038 black bears were killed in 53 counties during the recent Pennsylvania bear season. That total ranks the season as the seventh-highest harvest.
Some 224 bears were taken during the first-ever statewide, five-day archery bear season, and 2,815 bears were shot ......
2010-12-06 14:17:00
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Sometimes in my wanderings after the leaves are off the trees I come across enormous or otherwise intriguing trees and wonder what they are. Since I'm always walking amongst them, I'd just like to know who they are. Michael Hauck, 60, has planted some 150 species of......
2010-11-30 09:03:00
AD CRABLE
Not everyone can spend 11 hours alone with themselves in a tree.
If you're a deer hunter, planting yourself high above the forest floor is one of the best ways to see a deer, provided you can remain quiet, odor-free and pretty much motionless.
Many can't do that.
Some lack......
2010-11-23 08:53:00
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When Dan Rabold of Denver heads to his Tioga County hunting camp later this week for deer season, he and fellow hunters won't be able to drive certain dirt access roads to penetrate into state forest land like they used to.
A few of the roads near his camp in Tioga State Forest have be......
2010-11-08 20:22:00
AD CRABLE
Sometimes, some of the most interesting stuff I get comes AFTER I've written a column or a feature story.
Readers also send me a steady stream of stories, photos and queries they think I'd be interested in. They're right. Here's a sampling.
After a recent story about the seemingly......
2010-11-01 21:34:00
AD CRABLE
I remember the excitement I felt that December day in the snow in Clinton County in 1994 when the first fisher darted into the forest.
The release of the fearless predator — it had been captured in New Hampshire — was the first of 190 to be reintroduced to northern Pennsylvani......
2010-10-25 08:59:00
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Armed thugs have entered your home. You retreat to the bathroom. You are seated on a toilet seat, your suspenders dangling around your knees.
You yank up your suspenders and come out firing.
Phill Groff, a Manheim Borough policeman, went through that scenario in a simulated hand......
2010-10-18 19:46:00
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It didn't start out this way.
Kenneth G. Miller, a retired biology professor from Millersville University, needed a hobby and had this nice new digital camera.
So he set out to locate and photograph every butterfly native to Lancaster County. He tracked down about 95 percent of th......
2010-10-18 19:45:00
STAFF
......
2010-10-12 13:02:00
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Amazing accomplishments can be had from a little cap gun, a plastic replica of a crow bedecked in dyed chicken feathers and a small core of people dedicated to a cause. In 2006, a band of local residents became outraged that crows that have been migrating here for a winter respite for hu......
2010-10-04 20:46:00
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Maybe you fish, but chances are you're not a fly fisher. After all, only about one in every 10 people who fish cast flies. So, indulge me as I wring my hands amid reports this peaceful and engaging pastime is sliding toward the margins. It makes me sad to think future generations may ......
2010-09-27 20:51:00
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Multi-log vane deflectors. Mud sill cribbing. Rechannelization. Root wad. Throw out the fish biologist talk and here is what you need to know: By the time Dave Putnam and friends quit pushing dirt around on Climbers Run near Marticville in a few weeks, local trout fishing and the Chesape......
2010-09-20 22:05:00
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For all men are equal before fishes.
-- Herbert Hoover
The Gallatin River -- where "A River Runs Through It" was filmed -- and the Madison River are hallowed fly-fishing grounds in Big Sky country.
But the first few days of the three Crable broth......
2010-09-14 08:37:00
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It was the summer of 1986, and Gene Baur was slinking around the maze of alleys at the Lancaster Stockyards, photographing and filming what he felt was evidence of the inhumanity of "factory farming."
As they often did, he and his then wife walked by the "dead pile," the pit where dead......
2010-09-06 22:52:00
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Lancaster County's Conestoga Trail and York County's Mason Dixon Trail offer exceptional passages through the Lower Susquehanna's River Hills. But next Saturday, 400 men, women and kids will be traveling 28.4 miles on the paths through the rugged hills in a blur as part of the Susquehann......
2010-08-31 01:05:00
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Attempts to remove many of Pennsylvania's stay-at-home non-migratory Canada geese have shifted into high gear, perhaps partially due to the famous crash of Flight 1549 into the Hudson River. The forced landing into the drink in January 2009 made a hero of its pilot. But the incident ......
2010-08-24 06:30:00
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One night in 1987, Jeff and Kim Kann were watching television and came across this riveting show about the "river of bears" at Alaska's McNeil River. Chum salmon on a spawning run get held up at a gushing falls. Grizzly bears emerge from the surrounding brush from miles aro......
2010-08-17 08:44:00
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The shift of 3,700 acres from PPL to the public domain in the River Hills and Susquehanna islands of Lancaster and York counties is one of the largest land transfers ever here. It's taken a little longer than expected. Which maybe is why rumors and misinformation have been breeding....
2010-08-09 20:16:00
AD CRABLE
There's a new round in ongoing efforts by some to ban lead bullets and weights used by hunters and anglers.This time, a coalition of groups, including a small California hunting organization, have petitioned the federal Environmental Protection Agency for a nationwide ban on lead ammun......
2010-07-26 22:58:00
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New nature program launched here and in Philadelphia seeks to get minority and urban families hooked on outdoors.When she hikes, bikes, camps, fishes and generally gets outdoors, Tarsha Scovens notices how few minorities are out there.So the Philadelphia woman, who is black, along w......
2010-07-19 16:57:00
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One morning roughly eight years ago, John Mimnall and his son got into their vehicles parked outside their Lycoming County camp and started down the mountain.Rounding a bend on Slate Run Road, Mimnall pushed down on the brake pedal of his Plymouth Acclaim. The pedal went to the floor....
2010-07-12 21:52:00
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It's infuriating. In York County, a teenage bowhunter driving down a back road spots a monster buck. It's seven days before archery season but he stalks the 16-point trophy and kills it. At least four legitimate hunters had been scouting and hunting the deer lawfully over s......
2010-07-05 20:54:00
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What do you do in the face of the fear and sense of powerlessness that can accompany a shooting in your neighborhood?What Jessica King did was start planting seeds.The South Shippen Street woman got by with a little help from her friends by transforming a vacant lot bordering an all......
2010-06-28 22:10:00
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In 1994, I wrote a column on the pratfalls, bloopers and missteps that befell me in the outdoors. You would have thought one public humiliation would have been enough. But nooooo. Sadly, I have made enough goofs since then to fill another column. I mean, what are the chances when y......
2010-06-21 12:01:00
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"There is an overwhelming abundance of lightning bugs this year! Walked down Spring Grove Road last night and the trees were just sparkling. Thousands! I am 52 years old and have never seen anything like it." Celia Fauth, who lives in the Hamilton Park neighborhood of Lancaster,......
2010-06-15 06:52:00
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It's like stalking a deer but it's a fish. It's like trying to land a big-game fish but with a bow rigged with a fishing reel.It's bowfishing, an amalgam of hunting and fishing that people like Jack Ridings of Lampeter find addicting.So much so that he now guides other peop......
2010-06-08 23:17:00
STAFF
The Pennsylvania Game Commission's confiscation of a house finch from an Elizabethtown woman who had saved it from certain death continues to generate protests, pe......
2010-06-07 22:50:00
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Since Saturday was National Trails Day, I thought it was a good time for an update on the long-running case of Lancaster County's own Enola Low-Grade rail line. It's been more than 20 years since a group of Solanco dreamers dared envision that a soon-to-be abandoned freight line cou......
2010-06-01 10:35:00
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There is a magical glen near the Susquehanna River just upriver of the Holtwood Dam where the water gurgles, pools and rushes through moss-covered boulders and walls of rhododendron that should be erupting in blooms in the next couple weeks. Oakland Run is a ravine only reached by foot o......
2010-05-18 06:00:00
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On a Saturday afternoon last November, Dave Pidgeon and a hiking buddy were sitting at the expansive rocky overlook on the Appalachian Trail in Berks County known as The Pinnacle. Among the 150 or so who had climbed to the famous spot was a woman who said this to her husband: "I'......
2010-05-10 22:10:00
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Pati Mattrick's German shepherd just wouldn't go near the ivy-covered blue spruce tree just off her porch in Elizabethtown. Curious, she investigated and found two dead baby birds that must have fallen from a nest somewhere in the massive tree's loft. She disposed of them....
2010-05-04 06:48:00
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If you're just getting started in hiking, camping or backpacking, would you take the advice of someone who spent all of last summer on his duff in front of a computer? In this case, yes, by all means listen to Jason Stevenson. The Lancaster resident has just published a primer o......
2010-04-27 08:50:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
"Don't worry about stepping on them," George C. Gress tells me. "If you do, you'll just push them into the mud." We have donned rubber waders and entered this mucky meadow in northern Lancaster County on a splendidly sunny morning in search of Pennsylvania'......
2010-04-20 07:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
We're in an overgrown field hemmed by trees within sight of a Hershey neighborhood. On the walk here from his home, apprentice falconer Patrick Miller has kept a hood on the head of the red-tailed hawk perched on a kangaroo leather glove on his left arm. That's so the bird of prey do......
2010-04-12 23:59:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Can you have too much of a good thing? Pennsylvania turkey hunters may have to decide. Few game animal restorations can boast the comeback of the eastern wild turkey. Due to forest clearing and over-hunting, wild turkeys in Pennsylvania had ebbed to just a few thousand in 1900....
2010-04-06 06:46:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Those of us who find our lives defined by nature often can point to specific encounters where things clicked. For Bill Thompson III, it occurred when he was 8. It was Thanksgiving and a large white bird flew into the family's front yard in Iowa. His mother said she thought it wa......
2010-03-30 07:30:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Why would you NOT want to go trout fishing on Saturday? A forecast for a bluebird day with sunny skies and a high temperature of 74 degrees. No bundling up with hoodie sweatshirts against a cold wind or wet snow as in opening days past. Nearly 38,000 trout of various hues finning ar......
2010-03-23 06:30:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Perhaps no critter in Pennsylvania has been the subject of more rumor, notoriety and speculation than the eastern coyote. Remember the stories that persist to this day that the Pennsylvania Game Commission, or insurance companies or foresters secretly released coyotes into the state to t......
2010-03-16 06:50:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
It is among the most stirring wildlife sights of all — tundra swans, their graceful long necks and white bellies lit like glowing coals by the morning sun. They take off from the lake, bank as their "whoo-whoo-whoo" calls float to the mesmerized faces below, and are gone.......
2010-03-09 06:53:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
The snowpack is in full retreat. The rumored 40-inch snow was instead the warmest day in 40 days. Spring is a mere 11 days away.It's time to start thinking about warmer outdoor pursuits and I've got a great bit of news on that front.Lancaster County has its first home-based paddli......
2010-03-02 06:40:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
As she does several times each day, Rebecca Rutt glanced from her kitchen window to the pond below to see what wildlife might be visiting. To her dismay, she could see a large bird lying awkwardly on the iced-over part of the 1.3-acre pond.
Her husband, retired doctor John M. Rutt......
2010-02-23 06:07:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Raymond H. Bubb makes birdhouses. Unfortunately for the birds, the structures hardly ever make it outside. "They're really a work of art," says Lee Amigh, who helped coax the 86-year-old Bubb into making unique birdhouses as prizes for the Lancaster County Elementary E......
2010-02-16 06:35:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
This was a switch. We're driving from Lancaster northward to the mountains and the snow is petering out. How many times on these winter backpacks has our group departed a snowless Lancaster and headed for the Big Woods in search of the white stuff? Now, the reverse was true. Fo......
2010-02-09 07:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
You can see how it could happen. A Massachusetts birdwatcher seen near a swamp in an urban neighborhood with binoculars is taken for a "peeping Tom." The 47-year-old man says he was roughed up by police, who didn't believe he was birding in wintertime. Police say Paul Pet......
2010-02-02 06:42:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
You can be had. And then there's what happened to Danny DiPaula and J.R. Bachman at the Pequea Valley Sportsmen Association on a recent night. Yes, one of the oldest pranks of all time — snipe hunting — lives. It started like this: Tim Gilbert, president of the 76-yea......
2010-01-19 06:30:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
If you're an ice fisher, you've lived in agony the last couple wimpy winters when safe ice was measured in the weeks, not months. So hard-water anglers lately have been leaping for joy — I'm speaking figuratively here as jumping on a frozen lake would be somewhat foolhardy......
2010-01-12 06:43:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
How do the birds outside your window survive the recent foot-deep snowfall and bitter cold? Take a look and tell the folks at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. They've issued a Winter Bird Survival Challenge, inviting people of all ages to become citizen scientists and d......
2010-01-05 06:47:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
The chants of "Action now!" from concerned smallmouth bass anglers up and down the Susquehanna River are growing ever louder after another dismal reproduction year. A full two years into a special multi-agency investigation of what ails the river and its prized game fish, it's......
2009-12-29 14:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Almost anyone with a backyard bird feeder has been a witness.You're staring out your window, admiring a variety of birds alighting, grab a seed and hang for a few moments, then fly off. Then they're back again.Then, whoosh, a streak dive bombs, talons snaring a helpless song......
2009-12-22 06:03:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
With a presidential order pressing down on them, officials are looking for better ways to stop soil, manure, sewage and suburban runoff of fertilizers from getting into local streams and eventually the Chesapeake Bay. One buzzword coming out of the brainstorming: partnerships of public agencie......
2009-12-15 05:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
When Daniel Mohler hiked all 2,176 miles of the Appalachian Trail in 2006, his parents and eight older brothers and sisters kind of hoped he had gotten his wanderlust out of his system. Not a chance. Oct. 1, the 24-year-old dipped his bicycle in the Pacific Ocean at San Diego and bega......
2009-12-08 06:57:00
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Weston Martin, a 19-year-old college student from the Terre Hill area, had no classes on the opening day of Pennsylvania's buck firearms season. His brothers, Blake, 13, who attends Garden Spot Middle School, and Garth, 16, who goes to Garden Spot High School, were excused from basketball ......
2009-12-08 06:56:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
There is a 15-acre property in woods in Pequea Township which the owners each year save for a first-time or youthful hunter. Last year, a young boy and his grandfather hunted from the wood and plastic treestand. Both got bucks within a half hour. Also last year, Chandler Gilbert, t......
2009-12-08 06:54:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Julia Wade's first deer-hunting experience — on opening day last year — was not the kind that instills a lifelong passion for hunting. It was raining and cold and the 9-year-old from Holtwood was underdressed. She had a miserable time and lasted but two hours. But her ent......
2009-12-01 07:57:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
My worst fears have come true: I have a full-blown cold on the eve of West Virginia's buck season. Cough in the woods and you might as well be blowing an air horn. And here I am, sniffling like I do every time the father and son play catch in the movie "Field of Dreams." Ju......
2009-11-24 08:45:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
On nights when County Parks naturalist Lisa Sanchez had her mojo working, she has been brushed by an incoming owl, thinking her handheld recording was momma.You can't bank on bearing witness to such a close encounter, but attend her upcoming owl prowl and you will, in all likelihood, a......
2009-11-17 10:27:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Every serious bowhunter knows it. You do your scouting and you put enough time in the woods, the chances are good that you will get a shot at a buck. Brian Schreiber does that. But, after taking three very nice bucks in two months this fall, he also knows sometimes Lady Luck shines on you. In ......
2009-11-10 08:29:00
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What fun!
For Christmas last year my brother got me a scouting camera. I got him a battery-operated corn feeder .Partly, I wanted to see what big deer might be around our hunting grounds in West Virginia. But mostly, I was captivated at the chance to catch in the act the myria......
2009-11-03 06:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
It's perhaps the most glorious day of fall. And I'm smack dab in it. Fourteen feet up in a treestand on a ridge in the Appalachian Mountains. Leaves in crayon yellows, russets and muted oranges swirl by on their downward spiral, forming a new soft carpet on the forest floor. T......
2009-10-27 06:09:00
AD CRABLE
Picture a paved trail friendly to walkers, bikes and whatnot, tracing the Susquehanna from Columbia to nearly the Dauphin County line.It would flow through placid river bottom woods, restored wetlands and farm fields.It would pass picnic areas, historic iron furnace sites, an arched......
2009-10-20 09:29:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
"It just seemed to be in my blood. Mother Nature and I have had a love affair ever since I can remember. I'd rather be in the woods with Mother Nature than a lot of people."That's 71-year-old Ron Witwer talking. It's hard to get an interview with the retired Case New ......
2009-10-13 07:40:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
After a couple hundred years of abusing the wetlands in its midst, this city has made amends with a a major shout-out to embrace its marsh. The 212-acre Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge and the $11 million DuPont Environmental Education Center that peers into the reclaimed swamp ope......
2009-10-06 12:50:00
AD CRABLE, Staff
Darin Mack's goal was to get his son to Alaska to see a vast untamed wilderness before he entered the Marines after high school next summer. "Even though the times are a little tough, we just decided it was now or possibly never," says Mack, 36, of Avondale, Chester County. ......
2009-09-15 07:56:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
If you haven't been to New York City in a while, may I urge a visit to the Big Apple for a walk in the park. No, not Central Park. I'm talking about the new "park in the sky," the High Line. It's an instantly hip linear walkway built on an abandoned elevated frei......
2009-09-08 09:14:00
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The diminutive bog turtle, a creature discovered for the world in Lancaster County in the 18th century, is facing yet another threat to its long precarious existence.Already on the federal threatened list and endangered in Pennsylvania, the secretive bog turtles are now turning up dead, po......
2009-09-01 08:18:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
For years, local nonprofit nature groups have been permitted to meet for free, without supervision, in the North Museum of Natural History and Science. The museum's genesis comes from amateur naturalists and some of the groups provided the museum with their well-regarded collections. B......
2009-08-25 08:00:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
There are 35 Rock Runs in Pennsylvania, and none of them is as ruggedly, unremittingly drop-dead beautiful as the one I just plunged into, screaming all the way on the 20-foot fall. Several publications have anointed it the prettiest stream in Pennsylvania. Backpacker magazine has gone a......
2009-08-18 10:10:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Don't blame it on global warming, but remember the 10-foot-long manatee from Miami that showed up in Havre de Grace, Md., at the mouth of the Susquehanna River in June? That's only 43 miles from downtown Lancaster. Not quite as dramatic, but highly unusual and in keeping with er......
2009-08-04 09:33:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Some of the color is gone from this summer. I'm talking about a dramatic and worrisome decline in butterflies, skippers and moths this summer. "Have I noticed it? I don't see anything! It's unbelievable," exclaims well-known Lititz naturalist Al Spoo. ...
2009-07-28 09:44:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
I freely admit it. I got lost exploring the Lancaster County Conservancy's new Texter Mountain Nature Preserve. It was my first time at this newly protected northern Lancaster County gem and I was following Harnish Run, a lush high-quality stream with native brook trout. After I had my......
2009-07-21 06:01:00
AD CRABLE
Pity the poor eastern hellbender. Cool name, bad rap.This secretive, long-living salamander that can grow to more than to 2 feet long and reach 4-5 pounds, is one of the least-known creatures of its size in Pennsylvania.And horribly misunderstood.Heck, even look at its name. ......
2009-07-15 10:23:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoors trails
It was a backpacking trip down Memory Lane. Sixteen years ago, I had made this same taxing rock scramble to the top of Tibbet Knob with my first daughter for one of her first backpacking experiences. Now, I had returned with 8-year-old daughter Hannah, to hook her, I hoped, on one of my......
2009-07-14 10:05:00
AD CRABLE
It was a backpacking trip down Memory Lane. Sixteen years ago, I had made this same taxing rock scramble to the top of Tibbet Knob with my first daughter for one of her first backpacking experiences. Now, I had returned with 8-year-old daughter Hannah, to hook her, I hoped, on one of my ev......
2009-07-07 14:10:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
It's an evocative painting. A man poles his way across the Susquehanna in the shadow of the Pinnacle, near Pequea, in 1897, eight years before a series of hydroelectric dams began altering the free-flowing nature of the river. The man is floating by the piers left from the Street Road cov......
2009-06-30 07:52:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Pennsylvania could be largely devoid of bats within two to three years. That's the startling and sad outlook foreseen by Greg Turner as the sudden and mysterious white-nose syndrome fungus sweeps through the state. "I don't think anyone thinks we can stop it. We'll easil......
2009-06-23 06:58:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
On the surface, there's something decidedly lifeless about the Eastern Penn Mushroomers. I mean the object of their fascination mostly live on dead, rotting things, for heaven's sake. On a recent club foray in the woods of Gifford Pinchot State Park in York County, Cathy Cholmel......
2009-06-16 09:42:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Unquestionably, the half-mile that Pequea Creek alternately rushes, then languidly meanders, through a glen of cliffs, boulders and tall, shading trees is one of Lancaster County's natural gems. Where else in Lancaster County is there such a compression of wild water in such an un-Lancaster......
2009-06-09 07:57:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
You're riding along on your bike. The multiple lanes of straight paved highway are there. But so are the trees crowding in, chunks of pavement lying about. The two tunnels are dark and drips of water splatter on your head. And the quiet. "It's very familiar to you. You can s......
2009-06-02 08:45:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
It could have continued as an old sealed-off dump, closed to public access. Instead, thousands in Lancaster city and its suburbs soon will be only minutes away from a multi-use network of trail loops that pass through woods, a wildflower meadow, a picnic area long Little Conestoga Creek, an ar......
2009-05-26 07:20:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
It's a delicious irony. Here I am walking among big trees, thrilled by the sight of a scarlet tanager and wishing I could identify the warblers and other bird calls washing over me like a summer rain. I'm only 8 miles from the state capitol, but the trees all around me will be allo......
2009-05-19 09:23:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Depression-era Republicans campaigned for a chicken in every pot. Penn State Master Gardeners and ice cream giant Haagen-Dazs would settle for a blooming plant in every flower box. Alarmed at the continued decline of the honeybee, Penn State's Master Gardeners have launched a statewide camp......
2009-05-12 07:39:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
There's a good chance you don't realize that here in Lancaster County we are surrounded by bad and wasteful outdoor lighting. Unless you've been to a gas station so flooded with light that you forgot to turn on your lights when you drove away. Unless your children have grown up......
2009-05-05 14:37:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Here's a chance to do the scientific work scientists in Pennsylvania can't do. And, you can probably do it on your normal walks, maybe even in your backyard. It's so easy even a child can do it, and hopefully will. The Commonwealth's salamanders, frogs, turtles, snakes and ......
2009-04-28 09:23:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Local naturalist Mary Ann Schlegel can't coax her 12-year-old daughter, Hyla, into taking a hike with her. But when mom suggests they do an orienteering course, the girl scrambles for her sneakers. "I just think it's a marvelous way to get kids out in the woods and moving arou......
2009-04-20 07:08:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
If you pay any attention at all to birds — even if you just hang out a birdseed feeder in the backyard — it's been a remarkable past several months in Lancaster County. New bald eagle nests all over the place. Two new peregrine falcon nests. An inundation of boreal visitors s......
2009-04-14 07:02:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Professional anglers have their Bassmasters Classic. There are walk-a-thons and enviro-thons. Now, local birdwatchers, from rank amateurs to veritable ornithologists, have a Birding Classic. Combining elements of all of these, the Lancaster County Conservancy and the Lancaster County Bird Club ......
2009-04-07 08:50:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
If you enter John E. Byler's home in Manheim Township and take a left from the kitchen, you won't step into the family room. Rather, you enter first one, then another of Byler's vaulted-ceiling trophy rooms, containing mounts and memories of the hunter's big-game trips dating ba......
2009-03-31 13:36:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
With some spring rains finally arriving over the weekend, all systems are go for the opening of another "early" trout season on Saturday in Lancaster and 17 other southeastern counties. The rest of the state has to wait until Saturday, April 18. This is the third year for an earl......
2009-03-24 07:53:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Anglers, birdwatchers, families looking for convenient outings and anyone who loves the character of the Susquehanna River can all rejoice at new opportunities opening up around the Conowingo Dam. The hydroelectric dam 4 miles south of the Lancaster County-Maryland line has long been a destinat......
2009-03-17 07:30:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Late-winter cold and rainy nights. It's a great time to be alive if you're Jesse Rothacker. Rothacker, a herpetologist from Manheim and others who fear not nasty weather to view one of nature's great but little-witnessed orgies, creep across the Lancaster and Lebanon landscape in ra......
2009-03-10 09:07:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Tornadoes and snow and fishtailing airplanes, oh my. That's what my recent dalliance in the supposedly sleepy Deep South brought me. It begins placidly enough with two days in Savannah. Ever since reading "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," I'd wanted to explore her gho......
2009-03-03 07:08:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
In an upstairs room at the North Museum, Mark Larocque is throwing around more Latin names than spells in a Harry Potter movie. Larocque, who recently moved his environmental consulting business from Chester County to outside Quarryville, is regaling the Muhlenberg Botanical Society with colorf......
2009-02-24 09:18:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Are you seeing many more robins, Carolina wrens, bluebirds and vultures than you used to here in Pennsylvania? That's a good thing if you like to watch birds. But turns out it's likely a bad thing for the birds. A new study that examines 40 years worth of Christmas bird counts from......
2009-02-17 09:51:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Given: The Pennsylvania Game Commission is being crippled by a revenue shortage. Given: The agency could make a lot of money by allowing drilling for Marcellus shale natural gas, extraction of coal and ridgeline wind turbines on much of its 1.4 million acres spread across 287 game lands....
2009-02-10 09:20:00
AD CRABLE
What is it about these black powder shooters? They have a reputation of being fanatic about their hobby, which is shooting the firearms that enabled the white man to settle this country. Take Sue Curtis. Following an all-terrain-vehicle accident in December, the 61-year-old Clarkville, Md.......
2009-02-03 12:21:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
"It was very warm — barely 10 below zero — and the men did not mind."
— Jack London from a short story, "An Odyssey of the North"
Our group of five seem a long way from "The Call of the Wild" as we start our a......
2009-02-03 12:20:00
STAFF
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2009-01-27 08:21:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Winter, with the curtains of leaves and distorting humidity gone and views opened up, is an excellent time — if you are not adverse to such things — to seeing city skylines. It's not gazing into a patchwork of farmland or doting on undulating mountain ranges, but there's not......
2009-01-06 06:57:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
The Carolina parakeet, which your grandfather may have seen in Lancaster County. Gone forever. The passenger pigeon, once one of the most common birds in America and which nested in the treetops of Pennsylvania forests. Extinct. Martha, the last one, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1......
2008-12-23 10:51:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
"I went hunting for the first time and I'm only 6 years old," Cody Bonholtzer of West Lampeter Township wrote next to an on-line scrapbook photo of himself, beaming ear to ear and holding two grey squirrels he shot on a glorious fall day. "I had so much fun getting to hunt with my dad and pappy......
2008-11-18 07:57:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
The sidewinder rattlesnake and red racer had shared the same glassed home for at least seven years. One morning, the rattler wasn't there. Since it's not desirable to have missing poisonous snakes at a public zoo, there was a rather high-priority search launched. Where did the ratt......
2008-11-17 20:55:00
AD CRABLE
The sidewinder rattlesnake and red racer had shared the same glassed home for at least seven years. One morning, the rattler wasn't there.Since it's not desirable to have missing poisonous snakes at a public zoo, there was a rather high-priority search launched.Where did the......
2008-11-11 07:43:00
AD CRABLE
One of the more unique hikes you'll ever find in these parts takes place on Sunday, Nov. 23, on game lands surrounding Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area. Feel free to join David Stoddard and the Lancaster Hiking Club to walk in a ditch. Not just any ditch, mind you, but one laborious......
2008-10-28 07:59:00
AD CRABLE, Outdoor Trails
Here I was, surrounded by the Dolomite Mountains, but no place to go. Sure, our family was taking day trips into this school of hard rock to visit breathtakingly beautiful hamlets steeped in medieval history and architecture. I was being adventurous at the dinner table, ordering stuffed guin......
2008-09-30 07:17:00
AD CRABLE
First, the old farm was to be a commercial sports park. Then a retirement center. Then, ballfields. Then, possibly, a development with rows upon rows of homes. Now, it looks like most of the woods, hollows, fields and boulders in Mount Joy Township will be preserved in its natural state. I......
2008-09-16 09:40:00
AD CRABLE
Can you believe how much it costs to buy... No, not gas. Not milk either. I'm talking birdseed. Right about now is the time most people lug home those big bags of birdseed to stock backyard feeders and settle in for a feathered spectacle that continues through winter.
...
2008-09-02 14:51:00
AD CRABLE
The first time Carl H. Ernst came across a copperhead snake, he was a lad messing around the River Hills in Pequea. His dad killed the fascinating creature, as everyone did then. The last time Ernst went on about copperheads was to the Lancaster Herpetology Society a month ago, his first talk i......
2008-08-19 07:56:00
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Ernie Wilson thinks he just might be the best coyote howler in the world. As Pennsylvania's newly crowned state champion predator caller, the Conestoga resident will get a chance to prove it this weekend in Kansas City at the World Predator Calling Competition. Using mouth calls he ......
2008-08-05 09:50:00
AD CRABLE
It is indeed an irony of the natural world that the largest colony of the beautiful regal fritillary butterfly east of the Mississippi is on a military reservation where the earth is blasted asunder, churned up and burned over. An ancient North American species, the regal is a large reddish-ora......
2008-07-29 09:30:00
AD CRABLE
As trucks thundered across the Route 30 bridge above them, three men in chest waders quietly slipped into the Susquehanna and began jabbing the shoreline water with stunning bolts of electric current. Momentarily dazed, fingerling fish bubbled up and were quickly netted, measured and scrutinize......
2008-07-22 10:46:00
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Only a few years ago, it all seemed so promising. American shad, once a prized spring staple of locals' diet and an economic linchpin up and down the Susquehanna, at last seemed headed for a comeback amid a multi-state and federal restoration plan. Visions of again catching the silvery......
2008-07-21 10:00:00
AD CRABLE
More developments to report on Lancaster County's now-you-see-them, now-you-don't peregrine falcons. First the good news. Strasburg birder Tom Raub, who discovered a pair of falcons hanging out on the Norman Wood Bridge near the Holtwood Dam in May, has also spotted a pair perched on th......
2008-07-08 08:43:00
AD CRABLE
It's shaping up to be Pennsylvania's own gold rush. And like that freewheeling time in the old West, extracting the deep but potentially oh-so-profitable natural gas from the dark Marcellus Shale formation is generating some wild speculation. Swindle, conspiracy, happy days are here aga......
2008-07-01 09:04:00
DIANE BITTING
For years I've wanted to see with my own eyes the stony grandeur of Arizona's Grand Canyon. In June, I gazed gratefully upon the spectacular vista of buttes and plateaus layered in hues of red and sand. But I got more than just a bird's eye view from the South Rim of Grand Cany......
2008-07-01 09:00:00
STAFF
Tom Smithgall, senior vice president for development with High Real Estate Group, was doing a job inspection recently on the sixth floor of the Marriott Lancaster at Penn Square hotel building site when he heard this strange screeching sound. Following his ears, he found this cockatiel perched on a ...
2008-06-24 14:47:00
AD CRABLE
"Hen-RY! Fetch me some water!" "There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza." It'd been 40 years, at least, but the refrain from the old campfire song unleashed a cascade of fond memories of summer camps and campouts with friends. Last Friday night, ......
2008-06-17 07:51:00
AD CRABLE
In the latest convulsion to rip through the hunting community, particles of lead from bullets have been found in deer meat donated to the hungry in three states. Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa all at least temporarily halted meat donations. Is there a nationwide health threat of lead poi......
2008-06-10 09:44:00
AD CRABLE
Since he was 2, Mark (not his real name) has had a fascination with space. As the home-schooled boy has grown, the fathomless wonder of the firmament has taken even deeper root. "When he talks to all his friends about it, they say, 'You're boring,'" says the mother of the ......
2008-06-03 08:09:00
AD CRABLE
The meadow vole, having spent the night confined in a live trap baited with rolled oats on a farm just west of Millersville, responds to its liberation by sinking its teeth into the hand of David Zegers. The Millersville University biology professor has taken precautions, but he still feels the......
2008-05-27 10:16:00
AD CRABLE
What is it with ticks this year? A Manheim Township couple hiking the less-than-1-mile Turkey Hill Trail in Manor Township last week found five ticks — two on themselves and three roaming around the car — on their return. That's nothing. Walking several times along a river ......
2008-05-20 10:17:00
AD CRABLE
When Russell Guthrie moved to Lancaster County in 2003 it was not so much the architect-designed house in Manor Township that caught his eye. It was the short section of the West Branch of Little Conestoga Creek that flowed through his property at the bottom of the hill. "When I saw the pl......
2008-05-13 09:20:00
AD CRABLE
In how many places in Lancaster County can you find more than 1,000 mating toads, an old lime kiln, caves, gobbling turkeys, veins of intersecting streams and deep-hollow solitude — all within a minute or two walk from a road? Such a place exists in relative obscurity on about 130 acre......
2008-05-06 09:23:00
AD CRABLE
For nine years now, Lancaster County anglers have been blessed to have a world-class fishery in their backyard. Just over an hour's drive from the city, the Susquehanna River empties into the head of the Chesapeake Bay on what's called the Susquehanna Flats. Here, each spring, o......
2008-04-29 14:38:00
AD CRABLE
It's been a wild two weeks since I invited the public to help find Lancaster's elusive peregrine falcons. Respond you did. I got reports of peregrine sightings in East Hempfield Township, School Lane Hills, Millersville and the city. Several turned out to be hawks. Researching......
2008-04-29 14:10:00
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Fire from an errant machine gun round has burned about 50 acres of the only known regal fritillary butterfly home in the northeastern United States at Fort Indiantown Gap. Military officials said the fire occurred during training exercises between March 28 and April 18. Joe Hovis, a milita......
2008-04-23 07:02:00
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The weather is nice. People wander outdoors. It's great to be outside — unless, too many times, you're a baby rabbit, skunk, squirrel, groundhog, fawn deer, birds or any number of common wildlife. It happens every spring. People come across cute baby critters in the woods or their......
2008-04-15 08:30:00
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For the third straight spring, two peregrine falcons are being sighted in downtown Lancaster. Will they again seemingly disappear into thin air? Do they have a high-rise nest somewhere that will finally be located? The answer might depend on citizen scientists such as you. It'll tak......
2008-04-08 08:30:00
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Ask homeowners along State Street and Lancaster-area neighborhoods such as Grandview Heights and Hamilton Park what's special about where they live and trees is sure to come up. That's in keeping with studies that show trees are often the most important factor among people who love thei......
2008-04-01 10:57:00
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"There, ahead all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro."
Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Timothy Patterson is not a technical climber. Nor d......
2008-03-25 10:24:00
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After a rousing success last year, early trout season returns to Lancaster County at 8 a.m. Saturday. Angler surveys showed that moving the opening day up by two weeks in Lancaster and 17 other southeastern counties last year boosted opening-day attendance by about 10 percent and did not result......
2008-03-11 09:35:00
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It's dawn and the natives are getting restless as I pull into the parking lot of the Willow Point Trail at Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area. It's a half-mile walk on the paved trail to the lake, but the air is already seized by the otherwordly din of tens of thousands of snow ge......
2008-02-26 13:53:00
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How soon we forget. If you think hunting, fishing, conservation and our appreciation of the outdoors hasn't changed dramatically through the generations, just skim through very old editions of this newspaper. Take this item from the Aug. 12, 1902, New Era: A Hummelstown man was grav......
2008-02-19 11:36:00
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Centre County — Zero degrees — maybe below. Wind gusts up to 51 mph. Minus 31 wind chill. Eight inches of new snow. White-out conditions. Talk about getting out of your comfort zone. And to think just a few days ago I was afraid my annual winter backpacking trip might be a dud.......
2008-02-12 10:20:00
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Much of the time, you could play football on the barren bedrock below the Holtwood Dam. But when high flows are pushing down the Susquehanna and water is frothing over the 55-foot-high concrete dam, the river bottom becomes a seething whitewater. It was one of those kind of days in the ......
2008-02-05 09:38:00
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What's killing the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers' prized smallmouth bass? For several years, anglers and guides have been pleading for action on the mysterious die-offs, poor survival and cigarette-burn-like lesions on juvenile bass in the summer. In addition to the disconcerting ......
2008-01-29 09:06:00
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First off, vegetarians, vegans, PETA members and subscribers to Bon Appetit magazine should read further at their own risk. It all started over at the huntingpa.com Web site when some guy from Cambria County on the trapping forum wondered i......
2008-01-22 09:00:00
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Bernard Brown is an urban herper. For the longest time, he thought that was an oxymoron. Herpers are people who like to overturn logs and rocks trying to find snakes, frogs, salamanders and the like to photograph and marvel at. When the 31-year-old Brown moved to West Philadelphia sever......
2008-01-15 09:10:00
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We now know, to our everlasting joy, that 3,500 acres of River Hills forest on both sides of the Susquehanna Gorge will be preserved for us all, and not parceled out for development by PPL. Such natural jewels as Shenk's Ferry Wildflower Preserve, the breathtaking Pinnacle, Face Rock and Ur......
