The Outside Story

Cowbirds, with their sleek brown heads and shiny, black-feathered bodies, even look like they might be up to no good on occasion. New research suggests that indeed, they’ll go to even…

TITLE: Neutrons as Radio Tags AUTHOR: Geoff Wilson WORDS: 792 You are probably familiar with some of the fascinating observations that biologists have made by putting radio or satellite…

When you wake up in the morning and take a shower, brush your teeth, and have your morning glass of water, you rarely, if ever, wonder where that water comes from. For two-thirds of the…

The photos are disgusting: arms covered in purple welts and oozing blisters. The stories are also horrifying: there is the New Hampshire woman who needed intravenous antibiotics and cortisone…

The hill we live on supports two dairy farms, some beef cattle, and a few horses. A bucolic peacefulness descends as the animals graze upon the green slopes. Though the scene seems tranquil,…

Overhead, two dozen open burrs still hung from the chestnut’s limbs. The burrs, like the tree’s curled and deeply toothed leaves, had spent the winter on the tree. The nuts they once held…

Now is the time of year for cleaning out the woodstove and spreading the ashes on the garden, a chore that both prepares the stove for summer vacation and sweetens the soil for the coming…

In a showdown between a bald eagle and a great horned owl, who would win? A bald eagle has a wingspan that can be nearly seven feet. It can weigh up to 14 pounds. It has piercing yellow eyes…

With the welcome arrival of spring, each day brings new birds, many of them from far away. Their appearance - sometimes all the members of a species arrive within a few days - is the result of…

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land.…

In 1848, the bones of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) were uncovered in Mount Holly, Vermont, during excavation for the first railroad tracks across the Green Mountains. While these…

With deep snow lingering, now is a good time to perform the following experiment. Look out across a hillside that is a mix of forest and field. Now squint a bit. Which is brighter, the forest…

When snow finally arrived this winter, and high winds followed, I knew the trees would be on the move. Not just dancing in the breeze, but spreading into new territory. Many of our native…

There you are, leaning against a big maple in your sugarbush, drill and tap at the ready, when you think, “Wait a minute…is this a red maple or a sugar maple?” While maples…

My car is coated in long smears of salt. If I brush the car door, I’m left with a large, white, and somewhat tasty smudge on my clothes. While I’m always pleased to get home on winter…

In the spring of 1984, I spent many days in a study carrel on the seventh floor of Baker Library at Dartmouth College while writing Pond and Brook. One day, I walked past nearby Occom Pond…

If you take a close look at New Hampshire’s Mount Moosilauke, or the high peaks of the Franconia and Presidential Ranges, you can see gray bands of dead balsam fir trees within the green…

Nose-to-rock on the summit of Wheeler Mountain, just west of Lake Willoughby in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, I was attempting to unravel the microecology of granite ledges when I stumbled…

With trees stripped to their skeletons, winter is a good season for noticing the shapes that make hardwood silhouettes so distinctive. It’s a relief to put away the hand lens and twig guides…

Before you start reading this, grab a nickel out of your piggy bank and hold it in the palm of your hand. Golden-crowned kinglets are the smallest birds to winter in the New England woods.…