The Outside Story

At 5 degrees below zero, butterflies were the last thing on my mind as I brushed the fluffy snow from the porch. But as I swept away the last flakes along the railing, I noticed a small, brown…

They are fuzzy, buzzy, smell like honey (sort of), and I can’t convince my nearly three-year-old son that they are not bees. But even most four-year-olds know that cluster flies are not…

Along many rivers, especially where they wind through fields and pastures, it’s easy to pick out boxelders at this time of year. Well, female boxelders, that is. Boxelder is the only member…

Moths in the sap bucket! To the sugarmaker, this sight signals the winding down of the sugaring season. But to entomologists, it means that it’s time for insects and entomologists to meet…

Most Northeasterners are familiar with the causes of acid rain: nitrates and sulfates from the burning of fossil fuels that enter the atmosphere and cause rain, snow, and fog to be more acidic…

I see him high above the Wilder Dam, which spans the Connecticut River between Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Hartford, Vermont. With wings flat and primary flight feathers extended, he circles…

Few of us think about deer at this time of year. There are no fawns to be fawned over, no legal season for hunting, and only rare roadside sightings. Yet for the deer themselves, late winter…

I stood still as the weasel rippled, white and lustrous, through the stone wall. Six feet away, a deer mouse whose footfalls must have aroused the weasel, cowered against a tussock of grass.…

Hibernation is a concept that everyone thinks they know. Woodchucks hibernate, chickadees don’t. Woodchucks cool down and go to sleep in winter. Chickadees don’t. So cooling down…

The water level in any river ebbs and flows depending on how much precipitation falls, and the inhabitants of the river readily adapt to these changes. But what happens to aquatic species when…

You might not know it, but common goldeneyes are on the prowl. They’re out in icy waters, cavorting and splashing about in a quirky duck-dating ritual. The male, like a randy college…

On occasion I’ve asked friends what they knew about shrews, and almost without exception the question simply puzzled them. Not only had they never seen any such creature, they…

Natives of Central and South America, opossums are not particularly well equipped for life in northern New England, and yet they have been found here in increasing numbers since about 1900.…

One recent winter morning, when I awoke at dawn and glanced out our bedroom window, a nervous coyote slipped from the woods – crouching, tail tight between its hind legs like a naughty…

There it was, a faint orange glow in the northern sky. Could it be, at long last, the northern lights? I stared at the glow while the cold night air nipped at my cheeks. The light seemed…

It was a busy summer in the pond at the foot of my hill. Hundreds of wood frogs mated there. I watched their eggs hatch, watched as tadpoles grew up, got legs, lost tails, and headed for the…

Snip, drip. Jane Moscowitch snipped a shoulder-high phragmites down to knee height. She crouched and dripped a few drops of purple-dyed herbicide into its hollow stem. “Funny,” she said,…

Lake Fairlee, just in from the Connecticut River on the Vermont side, looks like a giant tadpole, its tail swung north to meet Blood Brook, its head southwest, feeding the unnamed fork of the…

We live surrounded by deer. They observe us as we cut wood, walk in the woods, or step out back to hang the laundry. They turn up at the edges of fields, deep in the woods, or in the rough…

I can’t stop thinking about butter sauce. I guess that’s no surprise. When we think about crayfish, if we think about them at all, it is often as either a New Orleans-style feast…