Start looking at birds, and you have to master a whole new vocabulary of lingo. Pretty soon you'll be talking about wingbars, eye-lines, eye-rings, throat patches, rump patches, and if you're a real voyeur, crissums. To know birds, you have to get your mind around the details.

Before there was James Bond OO7 the secret agent and ladies' man, there was James Bond the distinguished ornithologist and expert on birds of the West Indians. The real Bond met the creator of the fictional Bond on the island of Jamaica, and the rest is ornithological and cinematic history.

Everybody knows the bird, but most us have never seen it in the flesh: the great white owl of northern North America and Eurasia known as the snowy. Snowy owls used to be cigar salesman. Today, they gain appreciation as the most striking and massive of American owls.

You don't have to be crazy to believe in the existence of Little People. They exist. We call them penguins. Join me in reminiscing about wild penguins I have known.

If you have the privilege of getting close to a mink, it'll stink. But don't let the smell scare you off. These fierce, wide-ranging members of the weasel tribe offer fine entertainment to those who watch them.

If the history of medical science can teach us one thing, it's this. Don't underestimate dirt. From ordinary backyard soil and composted compost have some of the world's most useful wonder-drugs. Tuberculosis, a world-wide plague that killed and tormented untold millions, proved no match for the chemical weapons produced by a widespread microbe in plain old ordinary dirt.

We may be all cut from the same cloth, yet every one of us is one of a kind. The same holds for wild animals. In a given family of wild owls, robins, or raccoons, no two individuals share the same personality. Vive le difference!

Men are often drawn to women by their eyes. So it was with me as I was getting to know my wife, Debbie. In this case, there was more to it than just the color and depth I found in her luminous blue orbs. It also was what they saw.

On a cold winter day, I go out, then come in. Between the start and finish lie ninety brisk minutes of exercise and illumination. Join me!

Meet Corinne Parnapy, a real live phycologist. She studies that slimy stuff, green or brown or red, that we call algae. Is it interesting? Listen and judge for yourself.