Outside Story - Archive
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A Flea for You and Me
September 09, 2007
Imagine that you live in a dense forest of rough, dark trunks rising to an outside world you cannot see. You travel endlessly through this monotonous jungle, feeding when hungry on nourishing fluid readily available beneath your feet. When you do so, the scene shakes violently as huge pointed objects crash through the tangled canopy overhead, a bludgeoning directed at …
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Explosive Seeds and Spores
September 02, 2007
Q: Why did the witch hazel cross the street?
A: To grow on the other side.
Of course shrubs can’t really cross the street, but their seeds can. The seeds of witch hazel are shot out of capsules with such force that they travel up to 40 feet. We tend to think of seed dispersal as a …
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Dragon Hunter
August 26, 2007
Powdered dancer. Wandering globetrotter. Common sand dragon. These are only a few of the exotic creatures encountered by Pam Hunt on her quest last summer.
Hunt, a conservation biologist with New Hampshire Audubon, surveyed the Connecticut River for odonates, the order of insects that includes dragonflies and damselflies. “Odonate” literally means “toothed jaws.“ These jaws pursue mosquitoes and other small …
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Milkweed and Butterflies
August 19, 2007
Kids love the snowy seeds of the milkweed plant. Farmers take a dimmer view, wishing those seeds didn’t colonize their pastures quite so readily. Most everyone else, by and large, ignores milkweed, except for one particular critter: the monarch butterfly.
Starting in late July, milkweed plants bloom in baseball-size clusters of flowers. The flowers are generally described as pink, but …
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In Search of the Pre-Settlement Forest
August 12, 2007
If you wanted to learn what the local forest was like before Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, what would you do? One obvious approach would be to visit the few remaining bits of old growth forests in the region and draw your conclusions from what you see there today. Those remnant forests, however, would give you a picture that …
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The Plight of the Bumblebee
August 05, 2007
In the wooden storage boxes of the University of Vermont’s insect collection, there are plenty of examples of a native bumblebee species (Bombus affinis) that has a black head, broad yellow stripes, and no common name. Generations of net-wielding undergrads added fresh specimens to the university’s collection up until the 1990s.
Since 1999, however, and in spite of searching across …
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North Country Builders
July 29, 2007
Skilled builders are at work night and day in Vermont and New Hampshire. Some are architects with a flair for design; some are carpenters who cut raw materials to length; some are engineers who create technically efficient structures; and some are persnickety masons searching for just the right stone. If you think they are two-legged and speak our language, you’re …
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The Bermuda High
July 22, 2007
I’ve never traveled to Bermuda. It’s not that I have anything against it. It’s just that I feel as if I’ve been there enough already.
The most prominent summer weather feature in New Hampshire and Vermont is called the Bermuda High, “high” being short for high-pressure system. When the forecast calls for the three H’s - hazy, hot, and humid …
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A Mysterious Nighttime Disturbance
July 15, 2007
I remember walking across a parking lot to my car early one morning about 20 years ago. Under a streetlight was a pile of dead moths, looking a bit like a tiny pile of snow. I was tempted to take a snow shovel and heave away the heap of wings and bodies.
That evening, I saw yet another swarm of …
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Fifty Years of Weather
July 08, 2007
A lush, green swath of forest in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountains is not the first place you’d think of as being vital to the science of climate change. But at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, we are fortunate to have a valuable set of long-term records that give us a picture of exactly …
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