The Outside Story

By ordinary human standards, porcupines have many bad habits. Besides extricating their quills from the noses of pet dogs and livestock, humans must throw out axe handles and leather harnesses…

Under the hemlocks, our brook takes on a wildness, tumbling down terraced ledges, rushing around boulders, fretting over rocks. In the tree-cooled waters, I see brook trout fingerlings, no…

“Once upon a time there was a pumpkin.” If you wanted to tell the story of human civilization in this hemisphere, you could begin the tale that way. In between human beings…

The other day I was loading the last of the firewood into the woodshed when a friend stopped by. “Looks like fun,” he said. I happened to know that he himself was not a wood…

Leslie Bowen and her husband, Myron, keep track of 350 cattle, 28 horses, 30 pigs, and 120 chickens on their farm North Hollow Farm in Rochester, Vermont. For almost a year, Bowen has also…

Fifty years ago, the Connecticut River was called the best-landscaped sewer in New England. The river could not support aquatic life, and people could not use it to boat, swim, or fish. But…

I am hanging from the top of a 25-foot balsam fir tree, 3,500 feet up a mountain on a breezy day, counting cones. For more than a decade, I have been studying the fir forests high in the…

Some entomologists don’t like it when people call insects “bugs” because “bug” is the proper common name of only a small percentage of insects, those in the order Hemiptera. These…

The monarch flaps in my net as I reach in and carefully pull it out. My eight-year-old daughter peels an adhesive tag the size of my small fingernail from a sheet and gently sticks it on the…

In the Vermont and New Hampshire wildflower beauty pageant, ragweed certainly won’t win any titles. Problem is, it won’t win Miss Congeniality either. Until recently, most people…

Fish “get no respect,” perhaps because they are believed to be unintelligent creatures bound by patterned behavior. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their bum rap may be…

August is the month of migrating nighthawks. They leave Canada by the thousands, their stiff-winged beats churning the air above the Connecticut Valley and their wide mouths seining moths and…

We in northern New England continue to contend with acid rain. A report released by the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year stated that, despite a decrease in the acidity of…

Last autumn, I had the chance to see a private collection of over one thousand turtles. It included some of the rarest turtles on earth. There was a gray turtle from the Amazon that had…

The milkweed in our Vermont meadow droops, yellowing, as hordes of orange aphids huddle on the wilted undersides of its leaves, delicate stiletto mouth parts sucking plant juices as the blades…

Tacked to my office wall is a color-coded map, “World Biogeographical Provinces,” which describes the distributions of plant and animal communities. Unlike conventional maps with…

Just for a moment, imagine what the Northeast would look like if seas were to rise 4,000 feet higher than they are now. Northern New England would be reduced to a series of islands—an…

We have heard from our parents not to play with the shiny little balls spilled from broken thermometers. We have heard rumors of health problems related to dental fillings. And we commonly…

Right this minute, in the Connecticut River, is a very large, old eel. She has a snakelike body (yet she is a fish, with fins) and is a greenish-brownish color. She is slimy and will get even…

One summer night, in the light of a half moon, I saw a bullfrog trespass on another’s territory. The owner met the challenge full force. Eight times he inflated his lungs and guts, then…