The Outside Story

Ten years ago, I led a field trip to Silver Lake State Park in Barnard, Vermont. A few parents and a gaggle of children – bedecked in flippers and waterwings – lugged our gear to…

I was drinking around four gallons per year before I realized I had a problem. I should have kicked the habit right then, but instead I started making my own and was soon up to six gallons per…

Last year, the headlines read, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Found in Arkansas.” Scientists smiled and birders cheered. The largest woodpecker in North America, thought to be extinct for over…

During late summer and early autumn, raccoons in Vermont and New Hampshire witness something of a miracle: food falls from the sky. This is not their traditional fare of plants and…

If you find yourself gazing out the window in winter wishing the hustle and bustle of yardwork could be spread more evenly across the year, don’t despair. There is something you can do right…

After the leaves of sumac have fallen, the large, inverted cones of tiny red fruits that poke up from the tops of their wide crowns give the trees a top-heavy look – a look that is even…

This has certainly been a normal winter so far here in Vermont and New Hampshire – normal in that there’s no such thing as normal. Temperatures have been above average, and snow depth…

Birders who have been keeping a tally of their feeder visitors over the past half-century may have noticed an unusual trend: some species that once strictly summered here, including tufted…

“Ice happens,” says Rod Wentworth, a fisheries scientist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. For the animals that live in our area’s streams, the big question is where that…

Have you ever been walking through the woods on a snowy afternoon and seen a bit of green poking up through the snow? Seeing the green fronds of a fern at this time of year may seem like an…

My father, who notices these things, once noticed that the newspapers seemed to be misprinting the times of sunrise and sunset in December. They said the sun wouldn’t start rising earlier…

In mid-winter of 725 A.D., a 52-year-old cleric named Boniface chopped down the great Donar oak in the German territory of Hesse, thus depriving the Hessians of their traditional symbol of the…

When it comes to nature, we tend to stuff things we don’t know into pigeonholes that are already defined by the familiar. If someone tells me their cat has left a “present”…

So you think you’re a Sagittarius, right? Or an Aquarius? Well, think again. According to the horoscopes, I’m supposed to be a Virgo. Yet there’s absolutely no doubt that I’m a Leo.…

The winter coats are out, as are the hats, scarves, and mittens. We humans are hoping for lots of sunny days this winter to help keep our spirits lifted through the darkest days of the…

Here’s a question for the season: where does all that mulch go? Farmers and gardeners across Vermont and New Hampshire have laid down thick carpets of mulch – leaves, hay, straw,…

In recent years, the crepuscular wailing of coyotes has become as much a part of autumn in Vermont and New Hampshire as falling leaves and wood smoke. But coyote voices are not music to…

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) has recently been discovered in the Northeast for the first time. CWD is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (brain disease) that is similar to mad…

If autumn had a sound track, one of its main themes would be the honking of Canada geese as they slice the gray sky in their ever-shifting V-shaped formations. But if the call of the Canada…

Our local forests are generally susceptible to fire each year during two very short, dry periods. The first is when mud season has ended and the flush of green understory plants has yet to…