The Outside Story

Take a look at any Connecticut River tributary in August, and you’ll be hard-pressed to remember back to April when melting snow and spring rains filled it to its banks. At Spring…

I’ll admit it: I was one of those kids who hid behind the couch when the tornado lashed the Kansas prairie in the early scenes of The Wizard of Oz. My parents could only coax me back out…

Avid summer readers are immersed in thrillers, pot-boilers, and fantasies whose plots swirl around sleuthing and solving mysterious codes. But look beyond the printed page, and you will…

Some people call any wet, mucky place a bog, or maybe a swamp. They hardly ever think to call it a fen. It may well be a fen, of course, unless it’s a marsh. Or possibly a seep. How to sort…

“Lime, lime, and nothing more makes fathers rich and sons poor.” This adage hearkens back to times when soil fertility was poorly understood; farmers who worked acidic soils discerned that…

Anyone who has spent time hiking or walking in the woods has probably come across a trail that has been deeply eroded to the point of becoming a streambed full of large, unstable rocks. It’s…

This is the caterpillar summer of our discontent. They seem to be everywhere, eating the leaves off ornamental apple and cherry trees, defoliating black cherry trees in fencelines, and even…

There is a crop that most of us spend many hours on in the summer. We don’t eat it, sell it, or put it in vases, but most of us couldn’t image living without it. It is grass!…

Crows are a lot like us. Not only do they like to live in the same places we do but also they live as we do. “There is probably no organism on Earth that has a more similar social system…

Do ancient fish swim through your dreams? I cupped a frog in my hand and looked closely at a colorless little fleck in the middle of its head between two protruding eyes – the brow spot.…

Anyone who has ever mismanaged a pile of firewood has probably seen spalted wood: wood in a relatively early stage of decomposition that is irregularly bleached and vividly marked with thin,…

Despite the late spring this year, the wine-colored spikes of peony flowers have now pushed their way back into the aboveground world. These spikes will soon be covered with swelling green…

Victoria Weber of Bethel, Vermont, would like to add a season to our calendar. It would start after mud season and end before summer; in other words, from April to mid-June. She calls it…

Even if we shun the leggy creatures that make them, we marvel at the geometric precision and dew-frosted beauty of spider webs. There is nothing so elegant, so versatile, and so perfectly…

As a kid, I loved riding my bike endlessly around our Connecticut driveway, looping under an almost mythically giant maple. But one spring, my joyrides were tainted by hundreds of caterpillars…

Since the 1960s, the overall number of birds in at least one of our local forests has been declining. Not the number of species, but the total number of birds. This observation comes from…

The turtle was lying on the white line marking the road edge as I pulled my car over to move it. It was a small painted turtle, and its shell had a deep crack across it. She was taking her…

I was transported back to 1977 the other day, when I flipped to the peregrine falcon page in an old field guide. I saw that the bird’s range at that time was funneled down from widespread in…

By early June, when the growing season seems to be just getting up to speed, some of our most beautiful woodland wildflowers will have already come and gone. To find any sign of trout lily,…

Sea lamprey have been called the least-understood fish of the Connecticut River. Their very appearance can be startling: long, skinny, and eel-like, with a round mouth and no obvious gills.…