The Outside Story

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…

“Leaves of three, let it be.” What elementary school child doesn’t know this couplet, about one of the most dreaded plants in our New England landscape, poison ivy? At this…

Imagine that you live in a dense forest of rough, dark trunks rising to an outside world you cannot see. You travel endlessly through this monotonous jungle, feeding when hungry on nourishing…

Q: Why did the witch hazel cross the street? A: To grow on the other side. Of course shrubs can’t really cross the street, but their seeds can. The seeds of witch hazel are shot out of…

Powdered dancer. Wandering globetrotter. Common sand dragon. These are only a few of the exotic creatures encountered by Pam Hunt on her quest last summer. Hunt, a conservation biologist with…

Kids love the snowy seeds of the milkweed plant. Farmers take a dimmer view, wishing those seeds didn’t colonize their pastures quite so readily. Most everyone else, by and large,…

If you wanted to learn what the local forest was like before Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, what would you do? One obvious approach would be to visit the few remaining bits of…

In the wooden storage boxes of the University of Vermont’s insect collection, there are plenty of examples of a native bumblebee species (Bombus affinis) that has a black head, broad yellow…

Skilled builders are at work night and day in Vermont and New Hampshire. Some are architects with a flair for design; some are carpenters who cut raw materials to length; some are engineers…