The Outside Story

I often think back to the time when butternut trees were robust members of the tree community, before butternut canker swept across the tree’s range, infecting nearly every specimen.…

The spectacle of an osprey—a powerful raptor with a six-foot wingspan—plunging into the water from a height of a hundred feet and emerging with a fish in its talons might suggest…

Spring mornings and evenings at my family’s cabin in the woods of Waitsfield, Vermont, are charmed by the ghostly, flute-like song of the wood thrush. In recent years, however, wood thrush…

Winter’s back has finally broken. Painful memories of sub-zero temperatures are receding as red-winged blackbird and eastern phoebe songs announce the steady march of spring. Yet, far to our…

Vermont’s Interstate 91 is well traveled, but it’s a far cry from a busier superhighway close behind our house in St. Johnsbury. This major (but quieter) thoroughfare has two-way traffic…

A few years ago, I took my 6-year-old daughter Taylor on a snipe hunt. Not the kind of snipe hunt that most people are familiar with  a seemingly endless search for absolutely nothing…

Last week, on a dark, late-winter night, one of those all-too-familiar winter nights when the sky is clear and the temperature has fallen well below zero, I heard the call of a red fox –…

At 5 degrees below zero, butterflies were the last thing on my mind as I brushed the fluffy snow from the porch. But as I swept away the last flakes along the railing, I noticed a small, brown…

They are fuzzy, buzzy, smell like honey (sort of), and I can’t convince my nearly three-year-old son that they are not bees. But even most four-year-olds know that cluster flies are not…

Along many rivers, especially where they wind through fields and pastures, it’s easy to pick out boxelders at this time of year. Well, female boxelders, that is. Boxelder is the only member…

Moths in the sap bucket! To the sugarmaker, this sight signals the winding down of the sugaring season. But to entomologists, it means that it’s time for insects and entomologists to meet…

Most Northeasterners are familiar with the causes of acid rain: nitrates and sulfates from the burning of fossil fuels that enter the atmosphere and cause rain, snow, and fog to be more acidic…

I see him high above the Wilder Dam, which spans the Connecticut River between Lebanon, New Hampshire, and Hartford, Vermont. With wings flat and primary flight feathers extended, he circles…

Few of us think about deer at this time of year. There are no fawns to be fawned over, no legal season for hunting, and only rare roadside sightings. Yet for the deer themselves, late winter…

I stood still as the weasel rippled, white and lustrous, through the stone wall. Six feet away, a deer mouse whose footfalls must have aroused the weasel, cowered against a tussock of grass.…

Hibernation is a concept that everyone thinks they know. Woodchucks hibernate, chickadees don’t. Woodchucks cool down and go to sleep in winter. Chickadees don’t. So cooling down…

The water level in any river ebbs and flows depending on how much precipitation falls, and the inhabitants of the river readily adapt to these changes. But what happens to aquatic species when…

You might not know it, but common goldeneyes are on the prowl. They’re out in icy waters, cavorting and splashing about in a quirky duck-dating ritual. The male, like a randy college…

On occasion I’ve asked friends what they knew about shrews, and almost without exception the question simply puzzled them. Not only had they never seen any such creature, they…

Natives of Central and South America, opossums are not particularly well equipped for life in northern New England, and yet they have been found here in increasing numbers since about 1900.…