This Week in the Woods, we encountered a flock of palm warblers flitting back and forth between a corn field edge and trees along the Ompompanoosuc River. The birds breed in boreal forests, typically…

Jockey Hill Farm in Shrewsbury, Vermont has been in the Stout family since 1942. It has been protected by a conservation easement since the early 1990s and been enrolled in Vermont’s Current Use…

Imagine a deck of playing cards that allows you to play a game of gin rummy and also offers an invitation to explore our northern forests and to understand them in a deeper way. David George Haskell,…

Bush pilot John Knox, an old friend of mine from Piseco, a small community located in the heart of the Adirondacks, allowed me to copy this photo from his family collection many years ago. This is a…

“I’ve got something for you,” my husband calls from the front door. He’s found an oddly beautiful beetle in the autumn woods. It’s around three quarters of an inch long,…

This Week in the Woods, we found approximately 50 wood ducks perched together in trees along a river. In the Northeast, migration occurs from September to November. Although some wood ducks will…

Arising before dawn in ritual pursuit aware of austerity, sharp, acute a chill that has settled and defines for a time the spoils of silently watching. As the hoary frost on crimson leaves succumbs to…

After her own two children transitioned from preschool to kindergarten, Nicole MacKay became a teacher at Gale River Cooperative Preschool (GRCP) in Franconia, New Hampshire. Two years ago, the school…

We found these funky fungi with curled back, slimy caps growing in a mixed hardwood stand in central Vermont. What are these?

The deep purple caught my eye, an unexpected color amid the autumn-hued palette of gold, red, and orange. I stooped to look more closely, thinking perhaps someone had dropped some manmade thing on…

This Week in the Woods, we found this Wilson’s snipe in a local wetland. These birds look like elongated versions of their distant cousins, American woodcocks (both in the sandpiper family), and…

In September, as summer yields to fall, most of the colorful birds that breed in our region during spring and summer head south for warmer locales. The departure of ruby-throated hummingbirds,…

This Week in the Woods, we brushed up against some tree bark, and it flew away, flashing pink stripes as it went. Happily, this underwing moth didn’t go far. Once it had settled back into a…

Your August photos showed woody landscape scenes, as well as an abundance of late summer small life, from a temporarily blue-eyed snake to the unfortunately named bleeding teeth fungi. Although summer…

Geologist Peter Thompson photographed these rocks in East Thetford, Vermont. What is the rock type, and what would you call structures like this?

Growing up in suburban Washington, D.C, during the 1960s, Susan Hayward considered herself a “serious science kid.” During college at the University of Maine, she turned her attention to…

I have often been stopped in my tracks by the sight of a white-tailed doe standing in the lush summer grass. Depending on the sun’s slant, the animal’s coat is a rich shade of rusty brown…

This Week in the Woods, we’ve been paying closer attention to bumblebees. Like most other pollinators, they’re winding down their year as the weather cools. Unlike honeybee hives, which…

The grackle appeared early last spring, the day before I put the feeder away (so as not to tempt the bears who would soon be awakening from their winter dens). In the dim light of a cloudy day, this…

This Week in the Woods, we never actually made it into the woods, because we got distracted by so much interesting life at the trees’ edge. We found this great egret stalking frogs in a roadside…