The Outside Story

There’s a story about an early tourist from New York City who stopped his horse and buggy to watch a farmer harvesting a spring crop of rocks from his land. The farmer was loading rocks…

I grew up on a street lined with tall, stately elms. While walking to school one day, I found a bird’s nest that the wind had blown down. The nest was a beautiful, silky gray pouch. My…

Many of us avoid close encounters of the eight-legged kind, but if you’ve ever come eye to eye with a spider, you’ve probably noticed they have several more eyes than we do: most…

Some people have life birds, species of birds they’ve waited their whole lives to see in the wild. I don’t have one of these, but I do have a life mole. I’ve been waiting to…

Once, when I was little, I was so thrilled to come across a gorgeous, dark-red trillium that I picked it and placed it in a vase in the house. I was disappointed when it quickly wilted. Not…

As spring arrives, so do… bats? Like many other naturalists, I spend lots of time during this season looking for migrating salamanders and blossoming bloodroot. I’ve never thought…

One of the first spring wildflowers you’ll see – perhaps even before the last shaded patches of snow disappear – is the violet. This common flower, which blooms from April…

This May, while we thank the human moms around us, I’ve been thinking about the many dedicated moms throughout nature, too. Nurturing mothers come in many unexpected shapes and sizes,…

Anyone who has shared a home with a dog or a cat has learned something about the silent language of tails. Wild and domesticated animals may use tails for everything from communication to…

I love that time in spring when the hills around my house change from gray and brown to shades of yellow, green, and red. The trees have not yet leafed out, so what’s painting the…

One spring-like afternoon this winter, I was skiing near Middlebury, Vermont. The trail followed Otter Creek, weaving through cedar patches, hemlock groves, and past the occasional hardwood.…

Thump. Thud. Something was hitting our window! It was a bright red cardinal flying at his reflected image in the glass – which he perceived to be an intruder in his territory. The bird…

This is such a disorienting time, when all our lives have been turned upside down and shaken. One of the ways my own family is coping is by spending time outside every day. We stage nature…

Around the middle of March, I begin to feel that springtime urge to hit the road, to lace up the winter-neglected running shoes and start slogging through some miles. My early-season jogs take…

Sometimes it pays to be an insomniac. One frigid winter night, I climbed out of my restless bed and slipped outside to stand under a sky littered with stars and take in the complete silence of…

During the summer, I often spy common garter snakes sunning themselves in my garden. As the snow piles up through winter, covering the landscape in cold white, I wonder where these…

On a picture-perfect winter morning last year, 20 Saint Michael’s College students and I visited Vermont Fish and Wildlife scientists for ice fishing at Knight’s Point on Lake…

Every once in a while, as I’m tramping through the winter woods on my snowshoes, it occurs to me that I am walking on top of frogs. In winter, our thoughts naturally turn to the species…

On a walk one winter afternoon, I spotted two white objects darting across a snow-covered field. White on white, they were difficult to identify at first. It was a short-tailed weasel chasing…

I have always admired nature’s mutineers: animals and plants that thwart the recognized system and do their own thing. As a child I was the sole member of my own duck-billed platypus…