Outside Story - Archive
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The Caterpillar: A Larval Marvel
September 08, 2008
A woolly bear hunches along a rock wall, stops, raises its head and starts off in a new direction. Now that it’s late summer, this rusty-brown and black larva of the Isabella tiger moth is searching for food, shelter, or a place to spin a cocoon into which it will weave hairs of its heavy coat.
Caterpillars are …
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Dragonflies: Marvelous on Their Missions
September 01, 2008
Dragonflies are nature’s aeronautical marvels. Whether darting over water at 35 miles per hour or hovering in midair, they are a spectacle of colors in motion—from a delicate blue-green translucency to a jack-o’-lantern black and orange.
It’s no surprise that dragonflies have entered the lore of writers and cultures over the ages. Henry David Thoreau once called them …
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Their Goal: Saving the Butternut Tree
August 27, 2008
Butternut country is so distinctive that Parker Nichols knows he has arrived even before he sees the first butternut tree. As the proprietor of Vermont WildWoods, a flooring and millwork company in Marshfield that specializes in salvaging diseased butternut trees, he’s seen much of Vermont’s butternut country.
As he turns off the paved road onto a dirt road, …
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Winter Snows Bring Spring Flowers
August 18, 2008
The apple blossoms this past spring were the first hint of an unusual season – they were abundant and lovely. The crab nearest our house set fruit for the first time in a decade.
Then I noticed a black cherry blooming in a way I’d never seen before. From afar, it looked as if the tree were covered …
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Early Birds Are Already Flying South
August 13, 2008
The yellow warbler is a tiny explosion of color, music and tenacity. Every spring these songbirds arrive from the tropics to our alder swamps, willow stands and wet thickets. The male glows neon yellow with blood-orange pinstripes and marble-black eyes. He perches in the open and sings a rich, piercing ”Sweet-sweet-sweet, summer-summer sweet!” The female, a muted version of the …
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Earwigs: Remember Them Next Mother’s Day
August 11, 2008
An earwig still evokes a shudder after many centuries, for the insect’s Old English name, earwicga (”ear” and “worm”), suggests it might crawl into your ear when you are asleep and do terrible things to your brain with its rear-facing pincers. The meaning of the word earwig somehow later evolved to also mean “whisperer” (more appropriate for a harmless …
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Tonight’s Feature: Return of the Blob
August 08, 2008
In the 1958 film, “The Blob,” a huge amoeba-like creature from outer space engulfs and kills several people in a small Pennsylvania town before it is eventually destroyed by a local teenager, played by Steve McQueen. The courageous teen kills the blob using a fire extinguisher after he realizes it cannot survive cold.
This “blob” was pure science …
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A Hard-Charging Spider Without a Web
July 28, 2008
If the man in the film who explained, “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” turned his attention to you, and you ended up one centimeter tall and found yourself on the lawn, you would have your work cut out for you. You crouch under a clover leaf trying to comprehend a strange world. Grass blades bend as a young grasshopper—the size …
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A New Day for Nighthawks?
July 21, 2008
Several decades ago, after long hours of work in the carrels of Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I would make time for a walk around the library’s illuminated clock tower to view the aerial carousel of common nighthawks. In and out of the floodlights, they dipped and veered to feed on the wing, uttering an occasional peent.
This mesmerizing display …
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Solitary Wasps: Help on the Wing
July 14, 2008
Helpers are already at work in your garden and woods, though it’s unlikely you’ve noticed them. They are wasps, and they are busy killing insect pests.
Most readers will remember their first encounter with wasps. We learned that they are big, they sting, and (in the worst case) they live in large groups. Although these familiar wasps do …
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