The Outside Story

“Leaves of three, let it be.” What elementary school child doesn’t know this couplet, about one of the most dreaded plants in our New England landscape, poison ivy? At this…

Imagine that you live in a dense forest of rough, dark trunks rising to an outside world you cannot see. You travel endlessly through this monotonous jungle, feeding when hungry on nourishing…

Q: Why did the witch hazel cross the street? A: To grow on the other side. Of course shrubs can’t really cross the street, but their seeds can. The seeds of witch hazel are shot out of…

Powdered dancer. Wandering globetrotter. Common sand dragon. These are only a few of the exotic creatures encountered by Pam Hunt on her quest last summer. Hunt, a conservation biologist with…

Kids love the snowy seeds of the milkweed plant. Farmers take a dimmer view, wishing those seeds didn’t colonize their pastures quite so readily. Most everyone else, by and large,…

If you wanted to learn what the local forest was like before Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, what would you do? One obvious approach would be to visit the few remaining bits of…

In the wooden storage boxes of the University of Vermont’s insect collection, there are plenty of examples of a native bumblebee species (Bombus affinis) that has a black head, broad yellow…

Skilled builders are at work night and day in Vermont and New Hampshire. Some are architects with a flair for design; some are carpenters who cut raw materials to length; some are engineers…

I’ve never traveled to Bermuda. It’s not that I have anything against it. It’s just that I feel as if I’ve been there enough already. The most prominent summer weather…

I remember walking across a parking lot to my car early one morning about 20 years ago. Under a streetlight was a pile of dead moths, looking a bit like a tiny pile of snow. I was tempted to…

A lush, green swath of forest in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountains is not the first place you’d think of as being vital to the science of climate change. But at Hubbard Brook…

My research into the trout populations on the Batten Kill has been sadly incomplete. The Northeast boasts a number of blue-ribbon trout streams, but the Batten Kill is the only one in Vermont.…

Waiting for a friend in town, I stood near a broad stone wall of rough-faced blocks of Vermont granite. The hot sun beat down uncomfortably from the south, so I decided to walk around to the…

Jim Andrews, a herpetologist at Middlebury College, says it is a rare student who can pick out a gray treefrog on a tree when the frog is not calling. Gray treefrogs are masters of disguise.…

It’s turning into the year of the sugar maple, at least on our farm in the Connecticut River valley. First came the unexpectedly excellent sugaring season, which had all the makings of a…

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,…