Backyard birds like the familiar cardinals, bluejays, wrens and woodpeckers are an everyday sight in Chesapeake Country. But guinea fowl waddling through neighborhoods? Or a four-foot emu trekking across fields?  Not so everyday.  A flock of free-range guinea hens enjoyed a pastoral New Year’s weekend wandering through a Huntingtown neighborhood, foraging for insects and seeds across winter-dormant lawns.  The harmless birds are African natives that have been widely...

Every January, I receive questions on how to keep poinsettia plants and have them flower again next Christmas. My best advice is to dump them in the compost pile as soon as you get tired of looking at them or when they start dropping their leaves. Leave the growing of Christmas poinsettias to growers of greenhouse crops who have both the knowledge and the facilities to produce quality plants in full bloom in time for Christmas. The poinsettia is known as a short-day plant, meaning that it...

Dear Bay Weekly: Thirty years ago, while living in West Berlin, I went on a shopping trip to East Berlin. Although I speak some German, I am not truly fluent. I call it survival level. In the train station where I had to make the mandatory exchange into East Marks, I also made a visit to the ladies rest room. Of course there was a line. By the time I was second in line, the lady ahead of me was arguing with the restroom attendant. When she moved on and I was first, the attendant told me that...

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted –Aesop The truck driver approached the tollbooths on the Bay Bridge, laboring to maneuver his big five-axle rig into an open lane. Heavy traffic made it a tough job. An elderly couple approaching the toll lanes behind him saw his predicament and slowed, waving the trucker into their lane, directly in front of them. Catherine Noone, toll collection manager at the Bay Bridge toll plaza, has seen many people pay it forward —...