Mother Nature’s Regional correspondent has hung up her pen.
Joyce Moore wrote her final Outdoor Journal column after more than 30 years.
It was a combination of loves —nature, writing and a craving to learn that led to the popular column.
“When we bought the farm in 1971 along the Highwood River I started noticing all these birds flying by back and forth,” Moore said. “I realized I didn’t know what they were. So my husband Don bought me some binoculars and I took a birding course at Inglewood.
“I was always interested in writing, I had done some freelance writing, so it was just a combination of things that I love to do.”
Although originally planned to be in the High River Times, she was delighted to find it the new Regional in 1990.
“I loved being in the Regional because it was a bigger circulation,” Moore said of the paper, which is a partnership of papers in Claresholm, Fort Macleod, High River, Nanton, Okotoks and Vulcan.
Her first column dealt with the red-tailed redhawk and, like the birds she loves to wrote about, the column took off.
She wrote of her hiking and horse-riding ventures, as well as her travel s— contributing to the Regional her ventures from Kananaskis’ Pickle Jar Lakes to Africa.
“In 1993, we went to Kenya, Tanzania and saw the wildlife on the plains of Africa,” Moore said. “It was very exciting, we were in the middle of migration, and we were surrounded by hundreds of animals on every side.”
Some of the wildlife the Moores saw in Tanzania included leopards, lions, giraffes, wildebeests, antelopes and others.
“It is a wonderful, rich world of animals in Kenya-Tanzania,” she said.
She said she never at risk by wildlife.
“I never had to fight them off, sorry,” she said with a laugh. “We went up Cataract Creek and saw black bears and then we went up another trail and saw a grizzly. I wrote about that, but we have never been in danger.”
But it was the Foothills area she mostly captured for readers.
“We had some black bears, a mom and two cubs that were just up the road from our farm, we would walk through the and see a mule deer and the fawns sometimes practically right under our feet in the spring — there were many exciting things that I wrote about,” Moore said.
“The ride up Pickle Jar which is treacherous for horses sometimes… a lot of adventures… I have some mechanism in my head, I knew I had to write a column, so when I went out, I knew it could be a column.”
After 30 years and a moving from the farm, it was time to end the Outdoor Journal.
“We (Joyce and husband Don, a veterinarian in the area) sold the farm in the spring and so much of my observations and material came from the farm,” Moore said. “I just felt now was the time to stop. As I told Frank (Regional editor Frank McTighe) ‘I think I gave it a good go.’
“It has been a joy.”
Her tenure has spanned technology — first sliding a copy under the High River Times door, then faxing the column and more recently email.
Although she has written about Ma Nature from around the globe, she appreciates the things close to home many may take for granted.
One of her favourite birds? A hyperactive fine-feathered friend right in people’s backyards.
“I am very fond of the common chickadee — a bird that everybody sees in their backyard and everybody enjoy,” Moore said. “But there are many birds that I love.”
