Seeing the Sourlands Essays by Jim Amon

Shagbark hickory trees are tall, straight columns reaching into the canopy.Shagbark hickory trees can live for three hundred and fifty years. That means that there could be shagbark hickory trees in the Sourlands that started their life at about the same time that...

My bookcase is not organized in any logical way—or more accurately—not in any way at all.I wasn’t expecting the question and I completely flubbed the answer when someone asked me, “What are your favorite books on nature?” I stammered around a bit and named a couple of...

The Sourlands is a special place. How many times have you heard that? Probably too many times because you are already convinced that it is true. Its ecological importance and its importance as a place of refuge or a place of recreation for people is important. The...

 In autumn, spicebushes’ leaves turn a lemony yellow and their berries are an attractive red—especially attractive to hungry migrating birds. The many holes in the leaves in the above photograph may have been the result of feeding by the larvae form of a spicebush...

When I am walking in the woods and see a tree that has fallen, its broken roots sticking into the air in all directions like widespread fingers on an arthritic hand, it is like coming upon a piece of sculpture. I also enjoy the architecture of trees whose trunks have...

Pokeweed is spectacular in fall.Most descriptions of pokeweed start with a warning that pokeweed is poisonous. Everything about this plant is poisonous; ingesting its roots, its stems, its leaves, and its berries can harm or even kill most mammals—including humans....

When praying mantises to move from place to place they use their middle and rear pairs of legs to hold on and propel while their front legs are available to grab prey.At first, I thought that I would write an essay that combined three or four insects that struck me as...

  The Stony Brook and its branches define much of the Sourlands.   I was walking on a trail that parallels the Stony Brook when I saw an opening between the path and the water, so I stepped into it and went to the water’s edge. Whenever I am hiking and see water...

I was having a little trouble getting a photograph of an ant so I put a drop of honey on a jar lid and set it out on my patio. Within half an hour this ant showed up.  Shortly afterward the lid was full of ants feasting on the honey. I unleashed a frenzy of activity...

Tent caterpillars are social; hundreds can share the same nest and they often entwine for protection from the cold. Every year in early autumn an undistinguished-looking brown moth known to scientists as Malacosoma americanium flies to a place in a tree where two...

Green leaves capture carbon dioxide then convert it, along with water and minerals, into glucose. The trees and shrubs use the glucose to grow. The carbon dioxide is stored in the wood for decades or centuries before the plant dies and the carbon dioxide is slowly...

Ice floes broken from glaciers in Glacier Bay, Alaska. Global warming is the defining issue of our time.  How often have we heard some version of that statement? We read it in newspapers, hear it on the radio and see it on television all the time.  I recently realized...