The Outside Story

There you are, leaning against a big maple in your sugarbush, drill and tap at the ready, when you think, “Wait a minute…is this a red maple or a sugar maple?” While maples…

My car is coated in long smears of salt. If I brush the car door, I’m left with a large, white, and somewhat tasty smudge on my clothes. While I’m always pleased to get home on winter…

In the spring of 1984, I spent many days in a study carrel on the seventh floor of Baker Library at Dartmouth College while writing Pond and Brook. One day, I walked past nearby Occom Pond…

If you take a close look at New Hampshire’s Mount Moosilauke, or the high peaks of the Franconia and Presidential Ranges, you can see gray bands of dead balsam fir trees within the green…

Nose-to-rock on the summit of Wheeler Mountain, just west of Lake Willoughby in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, I was attempting to unravel the microecology of granite ledges when I stumbled…

With trees stripped to their skeletons, winter is a good season for noticing the shapes that make hardwood silhouettes so distinctive. It’s a relief to put away the hand lens and twig guides…

Before you start reading this, grab a nickel out of your piggy bank and hold it in the palm of your hand. Golden-crowned kinglets are the smallest birds to winter in the New England woods.…

How do animals cross the road safely when traffic speeds by at 80 miles per hour? Hopefully, they don’t have to. Officials from both Vermont and New Hampshire are working to make it easier…

Anyone who grew up in a large family knows how much time is expended competing for food, space, and attention. Who is going to get the best seat at the movies, be served dinner first, or enjoy…

Right around this time of year, when the mercury decamps to the far side of zero, the car won’t start, and the trip from woodshed to woodstove starts to feel Sisyphean, a little global…

Michael Walsh remembers seeing his first Carolina wren many years ago, a sighting that would not be so noteworthy if it happened today. It’s not that the plump, brown bird has become less…

In most of the animal kingdom, it’s the same story: egg meets sperm, embryo forms, and life emerges a set number of weeks afterwards. In humans, birth happens approximately 40 weeks after…

Wouldn’t it be great to doze off at work and still get something done? If you had a bird brain, you just might be able to pull it off. Studies have shown that birds regularly keep half of…

Remnants of summer’s tall goldenrod don’t look like much in November, yet they harbor unseen lives. Globular swellings partway up the stems suggest a strange departure from the normal…

Garlic mustard is trouble. Unlike many other invasive plants, it doesn’t stop at the forest edge. It thrives in partial shade and so has no trouble growing in forest understories. It can…

In my youth, I was an avid fisherman who listened to heavy metal music. But today’s anglers catch heavy metal on a hook while singing the blues, because many of the fish commonly taken for…

Autumn is closing fast. We toss wood on the fire, button up the house, adjust to lengthening hours of darkness, and believe wild things are going about their own preparatory tasks. My lawns…

The beaver floated with its head sticking up out of the water and just stared at me. In the early twilight, the beaver’s constant presence was menacing. It clearly wanted the pool to itself…

You don’t have to peer too far into the pages of history to find accounts of severe flooding in Vermont and New Hampshire. The Great Flood of 1927 tops Vermont’s all-time list while the…

Imagine a day in late autumn. The landscape is painted in a palette of grays and browns. You’ve watched the geese fly south. You know that bears, bats, and woodchucks will soon hibernate.…