For the record, I considered taking this column off. I figured I’d get the editors to hang a sign in the spot where they normally put me: “Andy Thompson is out of the office. His column will resume when he comes down from a tree stand in Fluvanna or Prince Edward or Caroline counties or wherever he is. Don’t hold your breath.“ Instead, I’ve emerged from the woods to bring you this dispatch. I do so reluctantly because, frankly, I’d much prefer to be out there still.

This past spring, the game department announced that it had found white nose syndrome in bats at two different caves in western and southwestern Virginia. The news was alarming on many fronts, not least of which is that so little is known for certain about the condition - how it is contracted, how it operates, how it kills. What is obvious are its outward signs: Infected bats exhibit a white fungal growth around their noses as well as on their wings, legs or tail membranes.

Is it a curse or a blessing to know the sunlight is fading, that you can count your last moments on Earth on one hand? Your body is failing, wracked by a cancer that invaded your liver and spread quickly. You don’t know how long you have, but it doesn’t feel like much. It’s a double-edged sword to know: You can count the precious few moments on one hand, but you also hold them in that hand. They’re yours.

Like it or not, every deer hunter worth his fox urine cover scent must also be a scholar of chemical attraction. Of course, I aspire to be worth my fox urine cover scent, every last ounce of the bottle currently sitting in my garage next to the red oak acorn wafers and natural cedar incense sticks. To bag a big buck, you must think like one. And this time of year, with the rut almost upon us, that means thinking about sex.

A little less than a year ago I wrote about the possible reintroduction of a substantial elk herd in Virginia. The eastern elk, of course, was native to Virginia and much of the eastern United States, but, due to hunting and habitat loss, the subspecies was extirpated from the region before the turn of the 20th century.

When I introduced the Urban Oasis series at the beginning of this year, the goal was to find patches of overlooked wilderness in the Richmond area. There are a surprising number of them - green spaces such as Williams Island, Powhite Park and Tuckahoe Creek that are often missed, even by outdoors lovers. But as I’ve searched the area for these places, what’s surprised me most are not the places that, through quirks of geography, are hidden away or off the beaten path. More surprising has been the number of places hidden in plain sight.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts doesn’t reopen until May of next year. The November First Fridays isn’t for three weeks. What’s an art lover to do? Usually the answer to that question would not be, “Go to Orvis.“ But tomorrow it is, especially if you’re into art with an outdoors theme. The fly-fishing store in the Short Pump Mall wraps up its Fall Orvis Days tomorrow with seminars on everything from duck and goose calling to targeting game fish around the Outer Banks. But for my money, the real draw is the art.

Throughout the summer and into the early fall, the biggest celebrities in northwestern Powhatan County were a bruin and a buck. In still-rural communities like Pine Tree and Trenholm, the pair was as well known as any Hollywood A-List couple. “A few people had set up cameras in the woods up there to see the bear, and they had,“ said Amy Potter, a lifelong Powhatan resident.

Imagine with me a day in the not so distant future. The ballpark debate has been settled. A gleaming stadium sits overlooking the floodwall and the river in Manchester. It’s April. Opening day. A day of pure promise. Your young son and daughter are ready, have been for hours. “Daddy, can we go now?“ they plead in unison.

As societal ills go, littering might not be up there with violent crime, political corruption or purse snatching, but there is something particularly galling about it. Really, how hard is it not to litter? Don’t flick your cigarette butt out the car window. Is that too much to ask? At least actuarial tables suggest smokers won’t be around as long to cover the streets with their refuse.

Funny the images that stay with you from childhood. Any time someone mentions the Civil War, there’s this snapshot that flits across my brain of being in my parents’ TV room watching the Ken Burns documentary on the subject. It’s nothing more specific than that, but I remember my whole family being glued to the TV for days. I was 12 when “The Civil War” came out. Four years later, Burns had us fixated again with his nine-part series on the history of baseball. He’s done much since then, including an acclaimed history of jazz, but nothing that really pushed the Thompson family buttons. That is, until this past week when “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” came to PBS.

In the room where I sit to write, a second-story makeshift office at home, there are two windows. One looks out over a road and the neighbor’s house, bracketed by two large silver maples. As long as I’ve lived in this house, these two trees have offered the first intimations of autumn. They always turn before any others in the neighborhood. It’s no different this year. In just a handful of places—the tips of a few branches—the one on the corner is turning bright red. Behind the house, the other maple has just started transitioning to brilliant yellows and oranges.

When I asked Matt Balazik about the gill nets he uses to catch prehistoric fish in the James River, he explained in his typically enthusiastic way about water temperatures and dissolved oxygen and how the ancient beasts he’s spent years trying to net and study can’t stay entangled too long—two hours at most. Balazik, a fish biologist working on his Ph.D. at VCU, has the kind of passion for his subject that is infectious. But his voice trailed off contemplating the idea that one of his nets could be responsible for the death of even one example of this giant and rare species.

I’ll talk until I’m hoarse about Richmond’s trails. For years, I’ve extolled their virtues to anyone who’d listen. The variety, the amount, the way they bring so many different kinds of users downtown while still maintaining a sense of wilderness. I’ve always argued that this re source is truly special. But then I’m a Richmonder. I’m biased. Now, however, you don’t just have to take my word for it.

CYPRESS BRIDGE In a slough off the Nottoway River south of Courtland lies an orgy of the gothic and grotesque. Few find it by accident, and those who do rarely know what they’ve stumbled upon. Until 2005, the Lost For est wasn’t on any map. They say true places never are. Only briefly every year can anyone explore Virginia’s most bizarre and wonderful 37 acres on foot. Today, though, is one of those times, and I’m lucky enough to have a guide, Emporia resident Kevin Kessler. He, in turn, is lucky enough to have as his guide Byron Carmean, the man who first “discovered” and named the Lost Forest. That is to say Carmean was the first person to recognize the matchless value of this grove of ancient cypress and water tupelo and call attention to it.