Brian Clinsky didn’t want to call the police on the produce-stealing grandmother.

But the last time she stole was the final straw. The woman had been taking produce regularly from the Muskegon garden.

Our landlord warned us that a beefy groundhog lived underneath the shed in the backyard.
But we started our very first garden anyway.
We cleared a patch of land and started everything from sweat and seeds: pumpkins, basil, tomatoes, carrots and sunflowers.
And surprisingly everything grew, sucking up sun rays and spitting out chlorophyll, until the possibility of homegrown veggies was nearly a reality.
Then the groundhog crawled out from his cave.
He spared the tomatoes and pumpkins, but mowed down the sunflowers and carrots like a freshly clipped golf course. He cut down weeks …

Some things are simply easier to do when it comes to living more environmentally conscious. Eating seasonally and locally may be harder for residents of the Great Lake states than others, according to the Seasonal Ingredient Map.

NOAA’s Great Lakes CoastWatch website is updated daily with satellite images of the lakes. It’s a great site, but unfortunately the images are often simple pictures of the tops of clouds floating over the region.
But, as a post on NASA’s Earth Observatory site points out, the sky opened up in late August and gave the agency’s Aqua satellite caught a clear, cloudless glimpse of the Great Lakes region.

Click the image above for an absurdly large version of the file.

In May Echo reported that the rare Kirtland’s Warbler population had increased for a seventh consecutive year in 2009.

But the unofficial 2010 census count shows that the population decreased to 1,758 males. Last year the count was 1,826.

What happens when you let several storytellers wander a Great Lakes island for a year? You get videos, pictures and words that capture its vulnerability to the outside world.
Belle Island Revealed, a yearlong project by the Detroit Free Press, examines the threat of invasive plants and animals to the city’s 1,000-acre park and how volunteers are trying to restore it. Belle Island is located within the Detroit River; it’s known as the jewel of Detroit.
Videos on the website show how Free Press videographer Brian Kaufman captured the island’s sights …

Each fall thousands of raptors like the American Kestrel, Bald Eagle and Turkey Vulture, cross the Detroit River every day.

And each one is counted by hand.

Farmers looking to sell to their communities, families who want to support them or someone who just likes perusing tents of sunflowers and produce on Saturday mornings have plenty of opportunities in the Great Lakes area.

In a section of the New York Times called “Room for Debate,” I recently found a discussion about the fishing practice “catch and release.” The online section invites different experts to debate current events and topics. This particular one was prompted by the headline “Catching but Not Releasing” and followed by the questions “Do fish feel pain?’ and “Should invasive species be thrown on the grill?”
I suppose after writing about Great Lakes issues for the past year, my eye is trained to read and look for stories about invasive species. …