The Outside Story

A woolly bear hunches along a rock wall, stops, raises its head and starts off in a new direction. Now that it’s late summer, this rusty-brown and black larva of the Isabella tiger moth is…

Dragonflies are nature’s aeronautical marvels. Whether darting over water at 35 miles per hour or hovering in midair, they are a spectacle of colors in motion—from a delicate blue-green…

Butternut country is so distinctive that Parker Nichols knows he has arrived even before he sees the first butternut tree. As the proprietor of Vermont WildWoods, a flooring and millwork…

The apple blossoms this past spring were the first hint of an unusual season – they were abundant and lovely. The crab nearest our house set fruit for the first time in a decade. Then I…

The yellow warbler is a tiny explosion of color, music and tenacity. Every spring these songbirds arrive from the tropics to our alder swamps, willow stands and wet thickets. The male glows…

An earwig still evokes a shudder after many centuries, for the insect’s Old English name, earwicga (”ear” and “worm”), suggests it might crawl into your ear when you are asleep and…

In the 1958 film, “The Blob,” a huge amoeba-like creature from outer space engulfs and kills several people in a small Pennsylvania town before it is eventually destroyed by a local…

If the man in the film who explained, “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” turned his attention to you, and you ended up one centimeter tall and found yourself on the lawn, you would have your work…

Several decades ago, after long hours of work in the carrels of Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I would make time for a walk around the library’s illuminated clock tower to view the aerial…

Helpers are already at work in your garden and woods, though it’s unlikely you’ve noticed them. They are wasps, and they are busy killing insect pests. Most readers will remember their…

Ryan Smith, a wildlife technician with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood with his back to the mouth of the Mount Aeolus bat cave in Dorset, Vermont, in early April. Behind him,…

In both New Hampshire and Vermont, landowners and state officials are discussing the benefits of removing old dams and restoring rivers to their historical banks. Many of these dams are small,…

My thoughts turn to gardens, the earthy fragrance of moist woodland – and to slugs tucked under a rock. Few things disturb gardeners so much as slugs and the silvery ribbons of slime…

How much can a bird’s egg tell us about the bird that laid it and how it lives? As it turns out, it can tell us a lot about the generalities, but little about the details. For example, what…

Old fields pulse with activity. Butterflies flutter, crickets call, meadow voles scurry, and black-and-yellow garden spiders ambush from dew-spangled webs. Early June footsteps release the…

“Going, going, gone! Big Papi does it again with a walk-off home run for the Red Sox!” How many times have Sox fans heard this call after that tell-tale crack of bat on ball? Until…

The poet Ogden Nash put it succinctly: “God in His wisdom / Made the fly / And then forgot / To tell us why.” True, it’s blackfly season, which is perhaps not the best time of year to…

The fleeting interval between late-April and mid-May, after the snow has melted yet before the canopy of leaves overhead is fully deployed, is when many of our native woodland flowers, such as…

Horsetails and scouring rushes are among the commonest plants around, especially noticeable early in spring when the evergreen species among this group stand out against an otherwise mostly…

Here are some ways to get rid of dandelions: spraying 2,4-D (an herbicide, banned in several countries for its health risks, but not in the U.S.); pulling up by hand; mowing the flowers before…