I have yet to hear of any snowy owls nearby this winter, although they’re on the move in the Northeast; Cornell’s eBird site includes recent sightings along the New England coast, in the…

In your December photos, a young piebald deer encountered a mature buck, an otter crossed the snow at sunrise, and a horse and rider travelled an old road-turned-trail. Photographer Ken Hatch…

The application of road salt to highways, sidewalks, and parking lots has resulted in improved winter driving and walking conditions. But salt is easily dissolved. It leaches into groundwater or runs…

Trees in urban areas provide tremendous benefits to society. They remove air pollution, reduce energy use, filter storm-water runoff, and reduce ultraviolet radiation. They also improve the physical…

Few things seem as remote as the January sun in northern New England. We see the light, but we feel almost no heat. In this way, winter can feel like a kind of exile – there’s a sense that…

The Fen is a private wildlife reserve in northeastern Connecticut. The 30-acre parcel was purchased in the spring of 2016 by Bet and Patrick Smith; here, Bet, who has a master’s degree from the…

Foragers gravitate toward the margins – hedgerows, roadsides, the shallow waters at the edge of a pond or lake, and the unkempt boundaries between woods and lawn. The forager’s path seldom…

While most insects in the Hemiptera order are land-dwelling (including stink bugs and assassin bugs), a few, such as these backswimmers, are aquatic. In the fall, when most insect hatches have ceased,…

Temperatures may plunge to 50 degrees below zero on Nunavik Quebec’s Ungava peninsula. But there, at the northernmost edge of our northern woodlands, lives a species of bird that toughs it out…

Some people keep lifelong birding lists. I’ve tried, but birds and I have never really hit it off. Too many colors, too many species, and I’m tone deaf, so birding by ear is completely…

In January, I found myself preparing for a reindeer round-up with a Finnish family in Jääskö, one of the 54 herding districts in Lapland, Finland. We were fortunate that the weather was…

Recently, I’ve been learning about ancient forests. This started when a teacher I met at an educators’ conference gave me a chunk of shale covered in fern fossils from the Llewellyn…

Like a lot of rural kids, my introduction to furbearing animals came through trapping. It’s not an easy endeavor ever – especially when you’re 12 – so the powers of the animals…

Jerry Milne sent along this photo taken in Connecticut. The scars, seen on the uphill side of the trees, are about 30 years old, and they all got their start at the same time. Do you know what caused…

There’s a giant living in northern Coös County, New Hampshire. It’s a 61-foot tall tree, the country’s largest known American mountain ash. At last measurement, it stood at a…

I once lived in a cottage perched atop a sloping field in Western Massachusetts. It was the lone structure at the edge of undeveloped forest and sat far from the road. The cottage had a large front…

What are these wire-like objects that have been exposed from beneath the bark of this dead ash tree?

Your November images documented early winter snow, as well as artifacts of summer life, revealed now that the leaves have fallen.  Squirrels hoarded mushrooms, a bull moose peered out from a…

I’m a big proponent of cutting up your own local venison – the local in that phrase used to distinguish between a deer someone shoots near their home and a deer they might take in a…

It’s the time of year when the landscape is laid bare, the ground is impenetrable with frost, and flying insects have faded into memory. As fall slides into winter, resident songbirds like…