The Outside Story

Three hundred million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the land. The earth they inhabited was hot and humid and covered in vast, swampy forests that today would seem most bizarre. Some of the…

When we moved to Thetford, Vt., in 1985, I marveled at the variety of forest songbirds in our midst. I counted as many as 26 species a year just in our backyard. Of all these, the most…

What do your computer and a peregrine falcon have in common? For most of us in rural New England, it isn’t speed. Rather it is polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), a group of chemicals…

A white ash seems nearly invincible. It rises in our forests straight and sturdy, with dense wood and a hearty symmetrical crown. Ash trees become tool handles, baseball bats and, back in the…

It is summer, but we see glimmers of early autumn now and then – a change in the light, goldenrods and asters blooming, mushrooms of various species emerging and proliferating in fields…

Amanda Priestley is on the hunt for a tree killer, and she wants your help. Priestley is an outreach specialist with the

When a tree nears the end of its life span, woodpeckers may arrive to puncture holes in its trunk. Rainwater running into the openings can carry bacterial and fungal spores that attack…

Like most of you, I spend my summer leisure time contemplating the tongue of the primrose moth. OK, it’s not exactly a tongue. Butterflies and moths have a straw-like proboscis that they…

The strangest animal I had ever seen crossed in front of my car, near the Thetford–Norwich line on the Connecticut River in Vermont last summer. It had a pointed snout, a tubular body…

On a meadow walk the other day, near my home in St. Johnsbury, Vt., I noticed a bright green insect dart along the path as I approached, then rocket into flight and disappear. It was a tiger…

One day I looked out my kitchen window and noticed two birds I had never seen before, digging in the gravel on my driveway, They were larger than the juncos that hunt for seeds among the…

The early light of dawn was filtering into the bedroom, when I heard that faint but distinctive pounding, as though someone were pounding with a tiny ball peen hammer. Ratta tatta tat-tat-tat.…

When the alarm sounded on a hot and dry weekday afternoon in April, fire crews from Londonderry, N.H., rushed in tanker trucks and pickups not to a burning house but to a fire at the…

One of the pleasures of the brief northern spring is moseying-about in back forties to learn what birds are arriving, what insects are emerging and what flowers are blooming. And among the…

It’s a strange, beautiful scene. I see cliffs and chasms and valleys unlike anything I’ve viewed on earth. It’s as though I’m glimpsing a rugged landscape on a planet somewhere far out…

When Andy Warhol said everyone would have 15 minutes of fame, he wasn’t talking about invertebrates. But in March of 1987 the dwarf wedge mussel garnered national attention when Plainfield,…

The Algonquin called them “moos,” a word for “twig eaters.” In winter moose munch on the buds and new growth of aspen, willow and other trees; they may even use their lower incisors to…

Without legs, wings, eyes, tentacles, or antennae, an earthworm appears almost too simple a creature to do anything. Yet, just for starters, they have well-designed tools for motoring: tiny…

“Fee-beee.” The chickadees that wintered near our house have added this familiar spring tune to their repertoire. The male birds are singing to proclaim territory and call…

With the sun finally warming the land, the buds have awakened are doing their things again. Filled with promise, they burst forth, tender leaf tips lengthening and flowers unfolding. In my…