Harry Potter rode one during the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. The Wicked Witch of the West zipped around on one in the Wizard of Oz. We’re talking, of course, about witch’s brooms. No…

It came from the lake. It is a life form nearly as old as life itself. Living peacefully in the depths for eons, it is awakened by humankind’s abuse of the environment. It strikes out with…

Who’s munching on this milkweed?

A couple weeks back our friend Mike Batten, a logger who lives down the road from our office, dropped off a century-old journal he thought we might find interesting. It was kept by Ernest Magoon, a…

Your photos showed baby snapping turtles emerging from the mud, a heron snacking on a huge fish, and one very tired looking daddy cardinal. Maples began to turn, kids frolicked on the rocks, and those…

Forest soils certainly benefit from the addition of plant nutrients. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium are the building blocks of leaves, twigs, trunks, and roots,…

On a warm August evening at Boston’s Fenway Park, everything had fallen into place by the fifth inning: The Red Sox were beating the Angels 6-0. My pals and I in right field were enjoying two of…

We call them shooting stars, and they never fail to make us catch our breath in surprise and wonder. But they’re not stars at all. Those bright, brief streaks across the night sky are meteors.…

Invasive species have earned their bad reputations. English sparrows compete with native birds from Newfoundland to South America. Australian brown tree snakes are well on their way to exterminating…

A post for posterity. This piece of old wood was found sticking up out of a young forest in Chepachet, Rhode Island. What kind of wood is it?

I went to a group-think exercise the other day where participants were asked to envision what the landscape in Vermont would look like 40 years from now under various scenarios. It was my first…

We see a lot of game camera pictures of deer, bear, moose – the big charismatic animals that people love. And so to be different we wanted to camera trap an otter, an animal that’s not…

Great Mountain Forest (GMF) occupies slightly more than 6,000 acres at the southern end of the Berkshires, in northwest Connecticut. The forest was under private conservation and management for nearly…

It was the dotted, orangey-yellow and black stripes that stood out, drawing my son’s gaze to the edge of the sandbox. A small caterpillar clung to the goutweed, munching away on the green…

Eight or so years ago I collected milkweed seeds and painstakingly buried them one at a time under leaf debris at the back edge of my yard, hoping they would mature and attract more monarch…

What happened to this leaf?

It is not an exaggeration to call the cattail (Typha spp.) the supermarket of the marsh. Food can be procured from cattails during any season – even the dead of winter – and nearly every…

Like a lot of kids who grew up rural, I was introduced to many of the wonders of nature through hunting. Specifically squirrel hunting, which is how most kids get their start. I don’t do much…

In 2006, I joined a team of biologists to trap bats in Vermont’s Chittenden County. We were searching for North America’s rarest bat, the Indiana bat, which had recently been discovered…

Multiflora rose is not without charm; in fact, there was a time when people went out of their way to plant it. The pretty spring flowers have a sweet scent; birds nest in the sturdy branches and eat…