The last week of April in the Ozarks taught me why old-timers planted corn when oak leaves reached the size of a squirrel’s ear—it’s a thermometer that doesn’t need batteries.

Most snakes you screamed at are harmless neighbors doing free pest control—here’s how to tell the five venomous species from the forty-five helping your land.

The spring ephemerals know something about timing that most of us have forgotten — how to find the gap and fill it before the canopy closes.

When the war came to Rolla, the brand-new courthouse became a surgery ward, and women whose names we’ve lost kept soldiers alive with skills no journal recorded.

When Congress decided to save the Current and Jacks Fork rivers in 1964, they preserved something I think about every time I walk to the creek.

The Phelps County Courthouse was barely a year old when the war came to its steps—I found the letters that tell us what happened next.

The CCC boys who built Lake of the Ozarks State Park worked in stone and timber meant to outlast them — and eighty years later, it has.

Late April in the Ozarks means warblers are moving through on their way north—I’ll tell you exactly when to look and what you’ll hear at dawn.

Those white dogwood petals aren’t petals at all — they’re bracts, and the real flowers are the tiny yellow cluster hiding at the center.

I watched a white-breasted nuthatch climb headfirst down an oak trunk, and it changed how I see every tree on this land.