The Outside Story

When nature calls, a birdwatcher should consider spishing in the woods. Nature calling, in this case, is the unmusical peeps, chips, tweets and whits of songbirds in winter. Lacking the…

Three months ago, our fields and forests buzzed and chirped with six-legged life: cicadas overhead, crickets underfoot. Now snow has blanketed the landscape, and they and most other insects…

The winter holidays are a wonderful time to learn about nature. After all, is there another time of year when we kiss under a parasitic plant? Or sing about decorating our halls with…

Last winter while walking in snow near my home in Worcester, Vt., I encountered a set of unusual paw prints by a creek. Curious, I followed the trail, my head bowed toward the ground, until…

So you think you’re tough surviving a northern New England winter? Well, consider the amazingly resilient “water bears,” creatures that live all around us but that can only be seen…

Question: Why has Vermont always been considered New England’s farm state? Answer: Geology, as in rocks and soils. Because of the limestone and other calcareous rocks underlying much of…

Conventional wisdom says that if you put up a bird feeder on Nov. 1 and take it down on April 1, you won’t have a problem with marauding bears, because they hibernate between those…

When we bought our old farmhouse 40 years ago, its source of water was a spring that gushed from a hillside. The water seemed clean thanks in part to gravel that had been placed on the muddy…

There is something odd about a moth flying through the woods in the angled daylight of November. Moths and November ordinarily mix about as well as fire and water. It’s basically too cold…

Looking out from the sun porch a few weeks ago, I noticed unusual activity near a sunlit corner of the house. Vespid wasps, better known as yellow jackets, were flying from a gap in the…

The tumbledown stonewalls that flank many a wooded road in New Hampshire and Vermont stand as picturesque reminders of former pastures and times gone by. They also have an ongoing function.…

Some now call it “The Great Loon Die-off of 1983,” in which nearly 10,000 common loons washed up on the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas. Those found alive were…

When in college decades ago, I took a botany course from a professor who lectured in a monotone and who believed the best way to learn about bryophytes—mosses and liverworts—was by rote.…

A small brown object dropped as I swung open the door to our garage loft. Before I could process what I had glimpsed, the thing unfurled black, umbrella-like wings, swooped to the wall and…

Each fall I spend quiet time in the woods getting reacquainted with – yes, you guessed it – Paraclemensia acerifoliella. OK, I admit you may not know Paraclemensia acerifoliella.…

Ferns reward a close look. Their beauty is easy to appreciate from afar – the way a bed of ferns catches the sunlight filtering down among the trees, splashing bright green on the forest…

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…