If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...

BREAKING: Krakatau Volcano in Indonesia - infamous for its 1883 eruption (VEI6, loudest recorded sound in history) has erupted in spectacular fashion today September 4th 2026 with an ash plume reaching the tropopause/bottom of the stratosphere. This could escalate further...

https://x.com/StefanBurnsGeo/status/2096007411274563603
For anyone confusing Anak Krakatau with Krakatoa:

Krakatoa was the volcano that produced the catastrophic 1883 eruption, destroying most of the original island and forming the caldera that still exists today. Much of the caldera is underwater, with its rim represented by the surrounding islands.

Anak Krakatau means “Child of Krakatoa”. It's a new active volcano that began growing within the 1883 caldera. Eruptive activity was first observed in 1927, but the early islands were repeatedly washed away by the sea. The present island eventually emerged above the water and continued growing into the active volcano that we see today.
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Beatrix Potter left fifteen farms and four thousand acres of the Lake District to the nation, with a condition attached that the fells are still arguing about.

Peter Rabbit money bought that land. Book by book, farm by farm, from 1905 onward, a Londoner with an income and a stubborn streak buying up Lakeland ground as it came available to stop it being sold off in parcels for villas.

What she did with it is the part that gets skipped. She farmed it. Properly. She bought Troutbeck Park in 1923 and built a Herdwick flock of over a thousand, took advice from her shepherd Tom Storey, showed her tups at local shows against men who had been doing it for four generations, and beat them. She was the first woman elected to lead the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association and died before she could take the chair.

The Herdwick was in trouble for the reason all hill breeds get into trouble. Slow growing, fewer lambs, small carcass. On a balance sheet it loses to a lowland sheep every single time, and the only thing...