Mark Hedden

What should the Florida state bird be? – Nan From The Block Oh, man, I have opinions on this. Currently Florida’s state bird is the northern mockingbird. And while it’s a damn fine species, nothing about it is particularly Floridian. Its range spreads across 38 of the lower 48 states....

What are the best ways to attract hummingbirds in the Keys? — Ethel’s Friend There’s only ever been one hummingbird species recorded in the Keys – the ruby-throated hummingbird. They are the one species that breeds regularly east of the Mississippi, but they don’t breed here. They winter here. You...

You could see them from a couple miles away, a thin ribbon of white over a thin ribbon of beige over a thin ribbon of azure. The azure was the edge of the Atlantic. The beige was the low line of the sandbar. The white was a flock of...

Swallows are perpetual motion machines, the original can’t stop/won’t stop birds. Occasionally they will rest briefly on a power line or a tree branch, but mostly, from breakfast until bedtime, it’s go go go. Paired with all that aerial vrooming is the fact that they hardly ever fly in...

It seemed like a squabble between royal terns at first – two seemingly identical birds, white with orange grove orange bills, way high up, circling around, one chasing the other, then the other chasing the one. But it also seemed a little flirty, like an improvised dance, a little...

I was hanging around with Kevin Christman, trying and failing to pick a splinter out of my index finger. Finally I gave in and put on my reading glasses so I could actually see the damn thing, and managed to bite it between my two incisors and pull it...

I didn’t go down to Mallory Square to see the skimmers. I went down to see the protest. A group of liveaboard boaters from Key West Harbor were understandably worried about what a new law recently passed in the state legislature would do to their way of life. It wasn’t a...

It was early and we were drinking coffee on the front porch. My wife had the good chair, the one where, if you tilted your head the right way, you could use the post to keep the sun out of your eyes after it came over the treetops. Which...

I was pedaling past the sexton’s office at the cemetery when I heard the shriek. Like a just folded poker hand, I can’t really recall its exact details now. But it was high and piercing, and my first and only thought was: hawk. It came from somewhere beyond the tree...

I was on my way back from the mainland. Mostly I’d been wondering exactly how many empty cruisers the sheriff’s office had parked on the side of the road these days. There had always been that one in Layton, but they seemed to be everywhere now. It’s pretty interesting...

When I first pulled up I thought I was seeing a half-dozen young roseate spoonbills on the side road that parallels the runway at Marathon airport. It would have been kind of ironic, because I’d just spent a couple days up in the Everglades, where spoonbills are supposed to...

You don’t think of Herman Melville as a funny guy, but he was. Darkly so. There’s an oft-quoted paragraph in “Moby Dick” where he talked about being in the grips of depression, a.k.a. the “damp, drizzly November” of the soul. He described himself as pausing in front of coffin...