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Naturally Speaking

Kiskadees
Naturally Speaking

Kiskadees

Tourists coming to Bermuda from Europe love kiskadees. I think it’s because they are so easy to see, but they don’t look as if they are. I remember clearly when I saw my first kiskadee. I was on holiday in Bermuda, reading To Kill a Mockingbird in a lovely Pembroke garden, would you believe. I heard that distinctive call, looked up and there he was, perched on a branch. I had never seen such a colourful contrast of rufous brown…


Naturally Speaking

Waves of Change

For so many mothers in Bermuda, Port Royal Cove in Southampton forever evokes halcyon days spent with their small children building castles on the sand or bobbing in the shallow water. It certainly does for me. When our son was…


Naturally Speaking

The Secret Life of Suck Rocks

In our daily walk along Horseshoe Bay, we have become intrigued by a colony of chitons or, as Bermudians call them, suck rocks (Chiton tuberculatus in formal parlance), half-hidden on one side of a rocky crevice at the far eastern…


Naturally Speaking

Miracle on the Beach

W. H. Auden’s poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” makes the point that the Old Masters knew that ordinary people were mostly indifferent  to momentous events. And so in Pieter Breughel’s depiction of the fall of Icarus, the boy who flew…


Naturally Speaking

Beguiling Bougainvillea

This article was taken from our archives. It first appeared in the winter 2006 issue of The Bermudian. It appears here exactly as it did originally. Maybe Hurricane Florence wasn’t as vicious as Fabian of 2003 fame. But she did…

Naturally Speaking

The Celebrated Calabash

When I saw my very first calabash tree at Orange Grove during the early 1970s, I felt a moment of instant recognition. The tubular flowers and the green oval gourds, oddly sprouting from branches and trunk rather than hanging from…