The Outside Story

Just as we’ve always suspected, mice do work in shifts. How else could they get so much done? The two most common species of native mice in our region, deer mice and white-footed mice, are…

Nitrogen is both friend and foe. It is essential to the growth of plants and other organisms; that’s why so many people apply nitrogen to their gardens. Before the advent of synthetic…

A “swarm migration” of dragonflies is impossible to ignore – if you’re lucky enough to see one. In a swarm migration, thousands or millions of these swift and colorful insects fly…

The health of America’s rivers has come a long way since Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire and the Connecticut River — though it never proved combustible — earned the dubious…

Aimee Kidder hiked up a small rise and down into a dip in the forest floor. Then again, up and down across another dip. Aimee, an eighth-grader at Hartford Memorial Middle School in White…

“I see a garter snake in my yard once in a while,” an editor once complained to me, “but it’s never doing anything.” It’s true that snakes live about as privately as sizable…

I grew up watching Walt Disney’s true-life adventures, where exotic animals from exotic lands paraded across a suburban movie screen for hour after uninterrupted hour. Music woven…

Wildflowers, ferns, mosses, and mushrooms narrate a rich story of the woods. They provide clues about climate, they disclose long-forgotten tales of hardscrabble farms, and they tell us worlds…

We could hear the pond before we could see it. The shrill “oak-a-ree” of red-winged blackbirds could be heard well into the surrounding forest. Closer to the pond, the loose banjo-string…

On a visit to the Galapagos Islands a number of years ago, I quickly became used to the daily “shoe dunk in the bucket” ritual. Traveling from island to island on a boat, we made sure our…

Traversing both the north- and south-bound lanes of Interstate 91 is an achievement for a turtle, particularly an irascible thirty-pound snapping turtle whose sense of appropriate timing had…

What makes a forest healthy? And can logging improve forest health? Perhaps you’ve seen ads – from paper companies, loggers, and sometimes foresters – with this message:…

A couple of summers ago, while working in my garden and enjoying the company of bumblebees buzzing in the tall, ferny asparagus, I noticed something strange. Each of the bees appeared to have…

You can hear the whine from across the room, higher in pitch and more ceaseless than the whine of a toddler, and even more annoying. If it has roused you from half-sleep, you have two choices:…

I mark the progress of spring by the succession of frogs that raise their voices to court and reproduce. My favorite, gray treefrogs, pipe up in late May, long after the wood frogs, peepers,…

When I used to think of water pollution, I imagined an industrial building with a pipe spewing smelly, vile-colored liquid into a river. I’ve never witnessed such pollution, but I do…

Deep down, most of us know that fireflies have a life, but a good firefly night brings such a flood of amazement and gratitude that questions about their larval phase, their diet, and their…

The first dawn volley of a yellow-bellied sapsucker on our metal roof is exciting because it signals spring. The twenty-first volley is a little harder to be enthusiastic about, but I forgive…

When the male bluebird first arrived in my front yard, I adopted a new routine. Whenever I reached the living room, I would glance out the big window to the north end of the garden, where a…

For those of you who view geology as a confusing bunch of stones from the ancient past, try this: Vermont has an income tax and New Hampshire doesn’t because Vermont is landlocked while New…