The Outside Story

One autumn day, 15 years ago, I found myself perched on a ladder that was leaning against a highway sign on Interstate 89 somewhere in Vermont. There was a wooden box clamped to one of the…

When asked to name the fastest animal on earth, many people will respond “cheetah.” But it is the peregrine falcon – a cliff-dwelling raptor –that holds that title…

A quiz: The first society to make paper was: A. Egypt. B. China. C. Vespidae. Answer: C. Vespidae is the family that includes paper making wasps, hornets, and yellow jackets. Social insects,…

Where I live, the three warmer seasons are colored gold. In mid-May, the fields are covered with dandelions. Then come the buttercups, which turn the landscape into a real-life Monet…

There is nothing wild about most wild rice. Most was grown in a “paddy” in California, harvested by machines, processed in factories, and finally wrapped in packages of cardboard…

Most people, when they look at a tree, look up. Understandable. The trunk lofts limbs skyward, unfurling a shimmering sunlight-gulping net of leaves. But with a little imagination (and, more…

It was a late-May afternoon in central Oklahoma and big time thunderstorms were expected to form soon. I was there as part of a 30-person tornado research team – a Vermont…

If you’ve been to camp or a business seminar recently, you may have played an icebreaker called “Two Truths and a Lie.” The rules are simple: tell two truths and one lie…

Move over emerald ash-borer and hemlock wooly adelgid. There’s a new invasive pest in town, and it may be coming to a viburnum near you. The viburnum leaf beetle, (Pyrrhalta viburni)…

If you saw a yellow-striped snake, could you tell whether it was a garter snake or a ribbon snake? To the untrained eye, the eastern ribbon snake looks like a thin gartersnake, the most…

When we bought the old farm two decades ago, the Ghost Tree came with it. He was an old sugar maple with a knothole face, tears in the trunk and branch stubs. He looks like one of the Ents,…

I remember being a kid in the backseat of my mom’s giant blue station wagon, lost in observation as the world rolled by. Growing up on the fringe of the urban world of Hartford,…

Every morning, my pool is the scene of six-legged tragedies: chunky beetles puttering around on the surface, looking for a leaf-cum-life preserver; a few flies long since deceased. Once, the…

Jim Hedbor, of Grand Isle County, Vermont, has been collecting moths for decades, but he has a distinct memory of one special night of moth hunting. He was on Cold Hollow Mountain in northern…

I’ll always remember the time I ran into a wire fence at dusk. I was taking a shortcut through some woods, and the impact sent me tumbling. Even when I looked carefully, I could barely…

At this time of year, it’s the caterpillars eating leaves in the garden or the deer flies after our blood that get most of our attention. But behind the scenes are many insects that eat…

It occurred to me recently, after spotting a white-feathered American robin scampering along a dirt road, normal-colored robins alongside him, that in all my years of observing wildlife and…

Those of us who enjoy forestry and baseball get a kick out of watching professional ballplayers stride to bat holding little pieces of the northern forest in their hands, though if…

Some ground beetles are big and beautiful: shiny black or iridescent green or bluish. And because many of them are unable or reluctant to fly, they are easily caught; you can get a good long…

Route 113 at twilight. The sun’s last gasp now just a smear in the western sky. Early stars over a stripe of asphalt that’s meandering down into Chelsea. My truck upon that road.…