Transition zones are attractive to many mammals, so we set this camera trap up on an edge where a stand of spruce met a stand of maple. Over the next few nights we captured images of skunks, fishers,…

We took these photos recently of a tree in full flower, in mid-July, in Vermont. Do you know what kind of tree it is?

By mid-July, the oregano in my herb garden has grown tall and tatty, and I want nothing more than to cut it back into a tidy mound. But I don’t. Doing so would deprive the flurry of common wood…

In The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, biographer Andrea Wulf provides an intimate view of a man who spent a lifetime sharing what he learned with the scientific…

A centennial edition of The Holy Earth was recently published, and it brings back the words of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954), a remarkable individual whose contributions to the well-being of…

One day last fall I trailed behind Ted Levin when he went to check up on his snakes. The day was so hot that most were out of sight in cool rock recesses, but even now, recalling the sound of their…

Zzz-zzzt. Sitting on my deck on a summer afternoon, I’m often distracted by a hummingbird whizzing by. The tiny bundle of energy hovers in front of a row of jewelweed, probing each pendulous…

Well it’s been a quiet month in my home town, out there in the valley of Vermont. Weather-wise, we’ve seen just about everything but a good soaking rain. There were a few days when it…

What’s on these leaves?

In your June photos, killdeer chicks hatched, young raccoons went on a morning adventure, and...what's that stone circle out in the woods? A squirrel met its end in a Cooper's hawk nest, a…

Unlike the majority of birds, brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) do not start life surrounded by their own kind. The females do not build nests, but instead add their eggs to the clutches of other…

Barry Genzlinger is up at 5 a.m. mixing the formula: one part goat’s milk to one part Fox Valley formula. As he feeds one of the pups tiny drops from a graduated syringe and talks about Izzy,…

Good friend and fellow tracker Paul Rezendes once observed that there are times when a species’ tracks will convince you that you are looking at those of a different animal. So it is with…

The Karner blue, New Hampshire’s state butterfly, is a wisp of a thing, a tiny fluttering of silvery-blue wings. Unless you happen to be wandering through a pine barren or black-oak savannah,…

Because different species and varieties of trees break bud at different times, there’s a big variance in the amount of new growth this time of year at Christmas tree farms. Using the new foliage as…

Now that the weather has improved, I’ve been out on my bike more. A couple years ago I wrote a blog about the wildlife you can see from your bike seat, and how this quiet mode of travel often…

Human life can, at times, seem chaffingly structured. We rise at the same time every day and make little daily migrations to the same building; come home and make dinner at 7, an act that’s so…

Jack-in-the-pulpits (Arisaema triphyllum) are not the most colorful spring flowers, but what they lack in beauty they make up for in interesting characteristics. These easily-identified plants are…

The first documented reports surfaced in the mid-1990s, sending waves of concern up and down the chain of Rangeley Lakes in western Maine: smallmouth bass – illegally introduced into Umbagog…

Editors’ Note: We tend to think of forestland as being either publicly owned or privately owned. But tens of thousands of acres in the Northeast fall into the category of “other.”…