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The Outside Story

The Forest Has Stopped Growing. But Why?

The forest has stopped growing. At least that’s the conclusion reached by scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) in Woodstock, New Hampshire, after studying the growth of…

Rotten Luck: On-Site Recycling in the Woods

The autumn wind and rain have stripped the hardwoods of their leaves, exposing the messy innards of our forests. From the roadside, travelers can glimpse a rotten stump poking up through the…

A Wild Thanksgiving

Wild turkey was a favorite entrée on New England tables two centuries ago. Turkeys were locally abundant as late as the 1830s, when a typical market price for a 15-pound bird was 25…

Love Those Litter Bugs

It would make a great scene in a nature movie. As the cameras roll, the stealthy predator lurks unseen behind some dead vegetation. A grazer ambles by, munching away, clueless to the nearby…

The Problem of Porcupines

By ordinary human standards, porcupines have many bad habits. Besides extricating their quills from the noses of pet dogs and livestock, humans must throw out axe handles and leather harnesses…

Coldwater Brook Trout

Under the hemlocks, our brook takes on a wildness, tumbling down terraced ledges, rushing around boulders, fretting over rocks. In the tree-cooled waters, I see brook trout fingerlings, no…

The World in a Pumpkin Shell

“Once upon a time there was a pumpkin.” If you wanted to tell the story of human civilization in this hemisphere, you could begin the tale that way. In between human beings…

Wood Warms You Twice, Not Thrice

The other day I was loading the last of the firewood into the woodshed when a friend stopped by. “Looks like fun,” he said. I happened to know that he himself was not a wood…

Has the Golden Ghost Returned?

Leslie Bowen and her husband, Myron, keep track of 350 cattle, 28 horses, 30 pigs, and 120 chickens on their farm North Hollow Farm in Rochester, Vermont. For almost a year, Bowen has also…

A Salmon in Need of Directions

Fifty years ago, the Connecticut River was called the best-landscaped sewer in New England. The river could not support aquatic life, and people could not use it to boat, swim, or fish. But…

A Good Year For Fir Cones

I am hanging from the top of a 25-foot balsam fir tree, 3,500 feet up a mountain on a breezy day, counting cones. For more than a decade, I have been studying the fir forests high in the…

Two Houseguests Worth Keeping an Eye On

Some entomologists don’t like it when people call insects “bugs” because “bug” is the proper common name of only a small percentage of insects, those in the order Hemiptera. These…

Monarchs on the Move

The monarch flaps in my net as I reach in and carefully pull it out. My eight-year-old daughter peels an adhesive tag the size of my small fingernail from a sheet and gently sticks it on the…

Something to Sneeze At

In the Vermont and New Hampshire wildflower beauty pageant, ragweed certainly won’t win any titles. Problem is, it won’t win Miss Congeniality either. Until recently, most people…

Incredibly, Fish Can See Around Corners

Fish “get no respect,” perhaps because they are believed to be unintelligent creatures bound by patterned behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their bum rap may be…

Nighthawks on the Roof

August is the month of migrating nighthawks. They leave Canada by the thousands, their stiff-winged beats churning the air above the Connecticut Valley and their wide mouths seining moths and…

Scientists Reverse Effects of Acid Rain

We in northern New England continue to contend with acid rain. A report released by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year stated that, despite a decrease in the acidity of…

Why Did the Turtle Cross the Road?

Last autumn, I had the chance to see a private collection of over one thousand turtles. It included some of the rarest turtles on earth. There was a gray turtle from the Amazon that had…

Attack of the Clones

The milkweed in our Vermont meadow droops, yellowing, as hordes of orange aphids huddle on the wilted undersides of its leaves, delicate stiletto mouth parts sucking plant juices as the blades…

Our Place on the Map

Tacked to my office wall is a color-coded map, “World Biogeographical Provinces,” which describes the distributions of plant and animal communities. Unlike conventional maps with…