The Outside Story

On a remote mountaintop in the Dominican Republic just before Christmas, a group of Vermont biologists crouched in the undergrowth and played recorded bird calls hoping for an early holiday…

Once the world discovers you know something about nature, the questions never end. Odd phone calls come from people you’ve never met asking about the identity of this or that plant or animal…

Bim … bim … bam. This late-summer sound announces that our oak tree produced acorns this year and is dropping them onto the metal roof of our shed. Along our road in Thetford, Vermont, and…

Didymo in a river looks like many gross things: trailing wisps of toilet paper, goopy brown blobs, a coating of slime. It’s commonly referred to as “rock snot” and for good reason. If…

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…