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Seeking Resilience What will our trees look like by the next edition of the Blue Wall Weekly? Our favorite Severe Weather Liaison from the SC State Climate Office, Frank Strait, has declared “the worst case scenario” for the base of the Blue Wall in Upstate SC. It will not be pretty. Limbs snapped, trunks snapped,…

    EAGLE COUNT! We do it most every January, assisting Tim Lee from the SCPRT in a nationwide survey of bald eagles. Last year we counted only 3, but we did much better this year! As you can see, we count most every bird we see along the way. (We don’t see them…

Trees ‍Bare-branch winter. Trees take on personality not noticed behind the screen of summer green. Consider, for example, tulip poplar, a neat, somewhat prim tree who spends life as a tidy column, orderly limbs thrown sharply heavenward like the praise stance of a church choir. Different, much different, than rangy oak. Oaks are cowboy trees,…

  ‘This week on Lake Jocassee’ section of the newsletter is exactly about that… what happened this week. Only, ‘this week’, we’ve been on vacation, so it’s hard to know for sure. However, after 8 years of Jocassee winters under my belt, I can just imagine. This time of year, mornings are quiet… so grab…

Canada Goose She was born here, but visitors to Lake Jocassee try in vain to chase her away. She is large, beautiful—regal, even—and not easily intimidated. She was a precocious youngster, walking and swimming from the time she hopped out of the nest. Rather than bringing her food, her vegan parents taught her, from day…

Our last tour of 2025 was on Sunday, December 28th. The day was overcast with misting rain and cool temps, but 5 folks showed up with smiles and great attitudes to brave the weather. Jocassee’s winterscape didn’t disappoint. With minimal boat traffic, we found ourselves, at times, looking out across the water and wondering if…

Reset Salt water laps this flat sand shore, and across its great expanse there is sky, not rolling blue ridges of mountain. Coastal plain people come to the mountains to reset; mountain people (or, at least in our case, base-of-the-mountain people) come to the Atlantic coast, where different pines and oaks live, where the wind…

  ‍As we head into this beautiful winter season, one thing you can count on seeing on Jocassee this time of year are our winter birds. On Wednesday, Zach saw 6 eagles, Matt caught a glimpse of a bufflehead hanging out in a group of horned grebes and my boat was lucky enough, in addition…

Christmas Green leaves of partridge (in a pear tree) berry vining through silver (bells) tufts of (Rudolf the red-nosed) reindeer moss. (Merry) Christmas fern. Bright red holly (jolly Christmas) berries on evergreen trees. These gifts, precious as any delivered by magi who follow that familiar star on a long-ago night, are our familiars. Even in…

Stranger things. We were on the lake looking for loons, and eagles, and Bonaparte’s gulls, for two days! It just doesn’t get any better than a couple of days on Jocassee with Master Naturalists. Turning the corner into Laurel Fork Creek, necks stretched to see some loons, someone yelled “otters!” There were two on the…

Winter When there’s ice on the birdbath and rhododendron leaves are rolled tight as cigars, the summer of 2025 is really over. We grab hats and gloves to leave the house. Mica insists on walking us every day, and neither heat nor rain nor freezing air will change her determination. A short drive takes us…

The false spring of early November has finally eased into more typical fall like weather but not before confusing some of the small leaf rhododendron into blooming out of season. Birds are arriving daily. Large rafts of Bonaparte’s and ring-billed gulls are floating on both the surface and the breeze. We’re watching grebes practice their…