The Outside Story

In the world of insects, life is usually short. House flies, for instance, go from egg to adult 10 to 12 times a year. There are no insects named Methuselah, and the name given to mayflies…

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear “lead poisoning?” Paint from old houses, perhaps – especially old window frames and sashes? Or maybe, if you’re a waterfowl…

Most of us don’t think about apples until there’s a chill in the air and the leaves start to tinge. For local apple growers, though, predicting autumn’s bounty starts when the rhubarb is…

Yellowstone has its wolves. Alaska’s Chilkat Valley has its bald eagles. And the Connecticut River has its… freshwater mussels? The Connecticut River, specifically, the upper Connecticut…

If asked to draw a trout, most people would probably draw something that looked like a rainbow trout. With a bright blushy stripe along its silvery sides and dark spots from head to tail, the…

With their feet firmly planted in the soil below the water and their heads high in the air above, cattails are a vital feature of ponds, bogs, and freshwater marshes. In early April, the…

If you flat your third and seventh notes, you can play the blues. Sadness creates a blue mood. A blue pigment gives us blue jeans. Then there is the blue jay’s blue. It’s not a…

The next time you are rushing around your house looking for your car keys, you might think about the chickadees at your bird feeders. Each fall, black-capped chickadees grow new brain cells…

“If you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.” Few dead horses have been beaten more thoroughly than Mark Twain’s adage – beaten so often we’ve…

In recent years, red spruce decline, sugar maple dieback, and other signs of trouble in the forest have all been attributed to acid deposition, which reaches the forest in rain, snow, fog, and…

A cavity in an old apple trunk outside my window is being visited minute-by-minute by a pair of white-breasted nuthatches. Less frequently, they are joined by their red-breasted cousins.…

Even though it’s cold outside, you may be warmed by the colorful nursery catalogs that seem to arrive in the mail almost daily. But as your eyes drift over the snow-blanketed landscape,…

Ask most people what the word “pollen” brings to mind, and you’ll probably hear “hay fever” or “allergies.” But ask a climate scientist the same question, and you’ll have…

It’s May and my first year in Vermont. I look out my office window to see a flock of robins land in the staghorn sumac trees that line the backyard. Before I can think, “Spring is…

A logging truck rolling through town on a winter’s day is still a common sight in Vermont and New Hampshire. Though winter has historically been the prime season for logging hereabouts,…

Colder soils in a warmer world? It doesn’t sound intuitive, but it is a possible consequence of global climate change here in the Northeast, and one that might have interesting effects on…

As I walked through a local tree farm recently, I noticed signs pointing out the timber, wildlife, and recreation values of the forest. In the Northeast, we are accustomed to thinking of the…

First, imagine a bat. It’s small. It’s brown or black (or maybe gray, silvery, or reddish, but probably brown or black). Its wings are large and leathery. Its body is tiny and covered with…

It’s an odorless, colorless gas; you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it. As one wag once put it, it’s just the thing to require a bunch of government regulation. But it’s also the…

Most people tend to call any crack in a tree trunk a “frost crack.” But then, most people don’t tend to slice open those trees to see inside. Walter Shortle does. As a…