The Outside Story

In late November, after its leaves have changed to a beautiful golden yellow and fallen to the ground, and sometimes even after they have turned sodden from cold rains and no longer crunch…

In Vermont and New Hampshire, most grasslands are pastures and meadows – ephemeral plant communities that depend on people to survive. Without mowers or livestock, they would slowly…

Remember the old adage, “snow is poor man’s fertilizer?” It turns out to be true. Snow and rain, sleet and hail, and just the dust settling out of cooling air carry trace…

As we move into the fall season, many familiar autumn insects are likely to catch our eye. Out-of-work yellow jackets are on the prowl. The glistening webs of the showy black-and-yellow…

Autumn color comes to the foliage of Vermont and New Hampshire in early September, crescendos in mid-October, and fades by November. What causes this display of color? And why is New…

Just as we’ve always suspected, mice do work in shifts. How else could they get so much done? The two most common species of native mice in our region, deer mice and white-footed mice, are…

Nitrogen is both friend and foe. It is essential to the growth of plants and other organisms; that’s why so many people apply nitrogen to their gardens. Before the advent of synthetic…

A “swarm migration” of dragonflies is impossible to ignore – if you’re lucky enough to see one. In a swarm migration, thousands or millions of these swift and colorful insects fly…

The health of America’s rivers has come a long way since Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire and the Connecticut River — though it never proved combustible — earned the dubious…

Aimee Kidder hiked up a small rise and down into a dip in the forest floor. Then again, up and down across another dip. Aimee, an eighth-grader at Hartford Memorial Middle School in White…

“I see a garter snake in my yard once in a while,” an editor once complained to me, “but it’s never doing anything.” It’s true that snakes live about as privately as sizable…

I grew up watching Walt Disney’s true-life adventures, where exotic animals from exotic lands paraded across a suburban movie screen for hour after uninterrupted hour. Music woven…

Wildflowers, ferns, mosses, and mushrooms narrate a rich story of the woods. They provide clues about climate, they disclose long-forgotten tales of hardscrabble farms, and they tell us worlds…

We could hear the pond before we could see it. The shrill “oak-a-ree” of red-winged blackbirds could be heard well into the surrounding forest. Closer to the pond, the loose banjo-string…

On a visit to the Galapagos Islands a number of years ago, I quickly became used to the daily “shoe dunk in the bucket” ritual. Traveling from island to island on a boat, we made sure our…

Traversing both the north- and south-bound lanes of Interstate 91 is an achievement for a turtle, particularly an irascible thirty-pound snapping turtle whose sense of appropriate timing had…

What makes a forest healthy? And can logging improve forest health? Perhaps you’ve seen ads – from paper companies, loggers, and sometimes foresters – with this message:…

A couple of summers ago, while working in my garden and enjoying the company of bumblebees buzzing in the tall, ferny asparagus, I noticed something strange. Each of the bees appeared to have…

You can hear the whine from across the room, higher in pitch and more ceaseless than the whine of a toddler, and even more annoying. If it has roused you from half-sleep, you have two choices:…

I mark the progress of spring by the succession of frogs that raise their voices to court and reproduce. My favorite, gray treefrogs, pipe up in late May, long after the wood frogs, peepers,…