I used to love watching Boston Legal on TV, in which William Shatner plays Denny Crane, the loony head of a law firm who occasionally claims to have mad cow disease. While guffaw-funny at the time, the group of diseases that mad cow disease belongs to, Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs), is not.

I tried one last time in mid-December to fill my caribou harvest permit from the Kenai Mountain herd. After post-holing on snowshoes for the better part of two days, it took my buddy and I all of 15 minutes of glassing upper Cannonball Creek before deciding to abandon the hunt. The short winter days, the minus 20 degrees, the 3 feet of snow, and the almost total absence of wildlife other than a handful of ravens, chickadees, redpolls, and gray jays made us think twice about continuing on.

In exchange for ice cream, my 10-year old daughter, Charly, and her friend, Anya, were picking currants when a couple of sedge darners landed nearby. Once the girls figured out that the dragonflies were mating, they changed their tune from “cool” to “gross” pretty quickly. The dragonflies were locked in the “wheel position” that looks a lot like a heart (see photo). This got me to wondering why these insects were having sex so late in the summer.

You've probably heard a lot about invasive plants, maybe to the point that the message goes in one ear and out the other. A lot of exotic invasive plants have desirable attributes like showy flowers that look good in a garden -- think oxeye daisy, toadflax, common tansy -- which is often why they get introduced to the Kenai Peninsula in the first place. Other exotic invasives were introduced because they make good forage or stabilize road banks (reedcanary grass) or fix soil nitrogen for agriculture (sweetclover).