Hawthorn fruits are nobody’s favorite, but they stay on the tree and are valuable emergency food / With body temperatures now near 40 degrees, woodchucks awaken in their burrows every few days, raise their temperatures to over 94 degrees and urinate / Beginning of the nesting season for great horned owls, our earliest nesters / The viburnums, such as nannyberry… (more)
Jan. 3-4: The Quadrantids meteor shower may produce up to 40 meteors per hour. Best viewing is after midnight / Now the birds are down to a skeleton crew: chickadees, blue jays, a couple of nuthatches, and a few woodpeckers are holding down the fort. Other species pitch in from time to time to brighten the day / Red foxes… (more)
Goldthread stays green all winter. It is a small plant with three-lobed, toothed, shiny leaves / Raccoons and skunks are nomads with a limited sense of territorial ownership. They’ll sometimes take turns using the same woodchuck hole for temporary shelter / Beavers and muskrats must adjust the structure of their lodges to accommodate various water levels. Winter floods or, conversely,… (more)
Yellow jackets are wasps that are often mistakenly called hornets or bees. The workers and males are dead and the queens are hibernating. They will build new nests in the spring / The dead remains of Canada lilies are easy to identify. Look in moist places for upright three-parted capsules on tall candelabra-like stalks / Southbound snow geese will spend… (more)
Trees drain their leaves of nutrients before they are shed – it is an active process; the trees are not really “losing” their leaves / Tiny spiders go ballooning on strands of gossamer and may remain aloft for two weeks. In the right light conditions you can see these spidery threads in the sky / Spring salamanders are mating. Eggs… (more)
Eastern wood-pewees are heading south. They sing well past the breeding season, right up until they depart / Timber rattlesnakes are returning to their hibernacula to lounge in the autumn sun before turning in for the winter / Shaggy manes will fruit if the weather is cool and wet / Mourning cloak butterflies emerge from their chrysalises. They overwinter as… (more)
Boneset (white) and Joe Pye weed (pink) begin blooming in masses / Mouse population is on the rise. Both deer mice and white-footed mice are omnivorous, eating insects and worms as well as all sorts of seeds. White-footed mice forage in the early part of the night. They call it quits around 1 am – just when deer mice become… (more)
Canada lilies are blooming / Look for otter latrines on stream banks and old beaver dams. Otter scat is often slimy and gelatinous looking, the result of copious amounts of digestive mucus that the animals use to break down vertebrae, chiton, and fish scales / As caddisfly larvae grow, they add new material to the front ends of their cases… (more)
Some warblers return again and again to the same territory to nest. Banding records show that both a redstart and a black-throated blue warbler returned to central New Hampshire nine years in a row. They each weigh in at 8 or 9 grams and winter in the Caribbean / Mother whitetails with twin fawns are keeping them in separate hiding… (more)
Baltimore orioles used to return to these parts in mid-May, but earlier sightings are becoming more common / Adult pear thrips emerge from the soil and fly to opening sugar maple buds / Dandelions may be pests, but a hayfield full of them is beautiful now / With aerial circling and a lot of chirping, tree swallows are claiming nest… (more)