The Outside Story

Quick – what hardiness zone are you in? If you happen to be a farmer or gardener, you’ll know the answer right off the bat, and it will probably be “four” if you live in New…

We had been looking for owls since before dawn. Mars, gleaming orange in the east, was visible as we pulled into the deep shadows of a hemlock stand. We played digital snippets of a barred owl…

Our fickle New England weather often appears in daily discourse. When boasting about having endured one meteorological extreme or another, we sometimes stretch the limits of our credibility.…

Picture Charlie Browne, executive director of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, walking along the edge of the Connecticut River on a winter day at first light. Perhaps the snow…

Perhaps the first thing that can be said about the winter sky is that, relatively speaking, it’s pretty boring. Discounting the occasional sun dog or freak crack of lightning in the heart of…

A snowshoe hare lives down our tree-shrouded road where the track narrows between dense woods. Also known as the varying hare, the snowshoe hare is cousin to both the smaller southern…

Wood is a renewable energy resource. It’s local: so local that, for many of us, it’s available just a few steps out the back door. It’s nearly carbon neutral: trees absorb enough carbon…

In years when winter food is scarce in the boreal forests of Canada, flocks of birds migrate south and irrupt or “burst” into local fields, forests, and feeders. The winter of 2007-2008…

Of all our native mammals, none seems to elicit more disdain or hostility than the fisher. “Nasty,” “bloodthirsty” and “vicious” are some of the adjectives used to describe this…

Lakes of the Clouds hiking hut sits on the southwestern shoulder of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. At over 5,000 feet elevation, the hut sits about 250 feet above…

Feeding deer is something of a time-honored tradition in New Hampshire and Vermont. The hardship of winter moves some well-meaning people to set out food for deer, while more-pragmatic souls…

We’ve taken down the window screens and fired up our two woodstoves now that more seasonable weather has settled in. We burn about six cords of wood each winter on our farm, a fact that I…

In October 2006, Charlie Hammond, a resident of Troy, Vermont, shot what he thought was a coyote in a field. Turns out, the animal weighed 90 pounds, about twice as much as the average Vermont…

American eels were once an important food source for the Abenaki peoples of New Hampshire and Vermont. When autumn arrived eels were captured in stone weirs as they migrated down river. Traps…

We’ve been transforming a small wilderness behind our house into a rock garden. Clearing away litter revealed a tiny, unusual fungus I’ve wanted to find for years. The Greek word for cup,…

With two daggers extending from each foot, ticks are well armed. And they are endlessly patient. Swaying on a blade of orchard grass, a tick extends its questing legs and waits. Night and day,…

A friend of mine told me about a hedgerow he liked to visit that was a short distance from his home. It was a spot he checked regularly with his binoculars, searching for the many birds he…

The next time you wander into a patch of stinging nettles, or contract a bad case of poison ivy, try to see things from the plant’s point of view. Our green neighbors get picked, eaten,…

I am sitting in the dark at the mouth of a cave. My knees are drawn up, and my heels are hooked over a slab of a rock to stop me from tumbling forward on the steep slope. If I stretched out my…

For shade, for stature, for sheer physical grace in the tree world, nothing beats an American elm. The first colonists in New England took notice of this native hardwood tree’s qualities and…