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An unusual bird, looking a little bit like a tanager, arrives in a listener's backyard. But, the coloring isn't right. The bird is an immature, male tanager, whose color quite different from a mature male's.

The colors of this bird can range from pale pink to bright magenta, depending on age, whether breeding or not, and location. Unlike herons, spoonbills fly with their necks outstretched.

If you’re interested in foraging, you might want to look in the old cookbook Charleston Receipts for the cherry bounce recipe.

In the south, a fungal disease ruins its timber value, but to support wildlife, this tree should be tops on your list.

Our native black cherry, Prunus serotina, is usually defaced this time of year by a large web of silk that houses several hundred leaf-eating Eastern tent caterpillars.

Our recently retired, due to illness, Clemson colleague Tony Melton has many constants in his life. For one, he has never stopped being the humble fellow from McBee, South Carolina, who started picking cotton when he was three years old.

The first released cultivar of the flowering callery pear was named Bradford and it was easy to grow, pest free, flowered profusely and best of all could not fertilize itself and make viable seeds. But then other cultivars were released into the market resulting in viable pollen being produced and transferred all over the place by insects drawn to those flowers.

Beidler Forest Audubon Center’s manager Matt Johnson said this is red-letter year for the larvae of the Eastern Tent Caterpillar. They were everywhere, the boardwalk was covered in frass, the polite word for insect poop, they were even falling on us from the trees! Although they covered with seta, hair-like bristles that sometimes cause serious skin irritation, these caterpillars are harmless to touch. Among the one hundred forty birds that spend all of part of their life at Beidler, are the yellow cuckoos. They sit by the nests of these caterpillars and gleefully strip the bristles off, devouring up to one hundred at a time. When startled by loud noises, such as thunder, they make a croaking sound, giving rise to the nickname rain crows. They lay eggs over a relatively long period of time; often depositing them in the nests of other birds.

When filming at Audubon’s Beidler Forest the Making It Grow team used binoculars to spy on a female Prothonotary warbler sitting on her eggs in a small hole in a cypress knee. Only the female incubates the eggs, which hatch after fourteen days. Then both parents are involved in feeding them, flying back and forth all day long bringing them insects.

These moths have a wing colour which varies from yellowish to light brown or even dark brown, with or without blackish shading. They are on wing from April to October in the south and from July to September in the north.