Articles by Dotty Holcomb Doherty

Here Come the Ducks

The fall flocks arrive this month

Bird enthusiasts and hunters wait for them every fall. Flocking to the Chesapeake from the prairie pothole region of north-central United States, south-central to northern Canada and Alaska, the ducks arrive. They dabble in our coves and lend their voices to the symphony of winter, harmonizing with the sonorous hooting of tundra swans and geese. Though the vast numbers of the past are no longer, this year’s duck factory output has bird-lovers cheering. ...

Article - News; by Dotty Holcomb Doherty; 11/8/12

How Do You Give an Elephant a Bath?

Would you walk 30 miles for the answer?

It won’t be the walkers who are sorest after Sunday, June 10’s two-day, 30-mile Chesapeake Challenge MS Walk. It will be the chalkers. For the past several years, my husband, Jonathan Doherty and our 24-year-old daughter Ruth have chalked jokes and pictures along the route of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s annual fundraising walk on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. My husband and daughter started their chalking to help me go the distance. But when...

Article - People; by Dotty Holcomb Doherty; 6/7/12

Taking Children’s Reading Outdoors

Take children to the outdoors with these authors who evoke the magic and mystery of the natural world.

For wonder-filled, read-aloud picture books, look for author Jane Yolen. Her Caldecott-winning father-daughter tale, Owl Moon, should not be missed: “When you go owling, you don’t need words or warm or anything but hope.” Also look for Sacred Places, poems and paintings on 12 magical spots around the world; and Ring of Earth, a child’s book of seasons told through animal-voiced poems. Local D.C. author Lynne Cherry’s...

Article - Books; by Dotty Holcomb Doherty; 6/23/11

For the Birds

Volunteer birders stalked their prey for five years to create the new Atlas of Breeding Birds in Maryland

New osprey heads are popping over edges of nests all over Chesapeake Country. Puffs of tiny brown Carolina wren fledglings erupt from our porches and shrubs, the second brood since April. Soon, beneath our feeders, cardinal babies, whose sprouts of downy feathers remind us of our own bad-hair days, will beg for food from their parents. Evidence of nesting is easy to find when the birds hop about our doorsteps. But most of Maryland and D.C.’s 206 species of breeding...

Article - News; by Dotty Holcomb Doherty; 6/9/11

My Mother Taught Me the Three Rs: Reuse, Reduce,...

And she’s still my champion

My mother was a reuser well before it became one of the fashionable three Rs every schoolchild knows today. At 93, she still lives by herself in the house where I grew up in southeastern Massachusetts. My twin sister Patty and I always knew if we needed a box, any size or shape, Mom would have it. Her packrat nature extended to coffee cans, rags, glass jars and plastic containers. Remember Skinny Minny ice milk from the 1960s? She has a collection of tubs in her basement if you need one...