102 results for declan

For focus, exercise, and pleasant distraction, scientist Declan McCabe takes frequent walks along Vermont's Winooski River. The brief trips provide solitude, grounding, and an opportunity…

For 12 summers, my Vermont colleagues and I offered guidance to high school student and teacher teams who conducted research on streams as part of a National Science Foundation EPSCoR program.…

This week in the woods, the landscape shows its skeleton, and we can see the true ridgeline beneath the now-leafless hardwoods. Also more apparent during the beginning of this bare month are…

This week in the woods, Editor Meghan McCarthy McPhaul encountered this garter snake making its way across a field, perhaps on its way to winter lodging. The snakes typically move into…

Picture this: you are a single mother, and to ensure the success of your children, you’ll have to immobilize a still-living animal almost twice your weight and haul it back to a tunnel…

Turning Stones looks at the mysteries and life found in fresh water. The essays in this volume explore the diversity of life that depends on water and examine a range of life forms before…

This week in the woods, we enjoyed our office backyard “moth ball” with lepidopterist JoAnne Russo, who identified a whopping 86 different moth species flitting through the night…

Intolerance of disturbance, specific habitat requirements, and narrow distribution: these are characteristics that threaten species with extinction. Unfortunately, the Chittenango ovate amber…

The sharpest contrast between rivers and lakes is in water movement. While rivers flow inexorably downhill, lake water movement is more subtle. Anyone who has weathered a storm on a lake,…

This week in the woods, one of our most exciting finds was, by design, not very exciting to look at. This is a well-hidden active barred owl nest, a status we realized a few seconds after…

More than 400 million years ago, when invertebrates ruled Ordovician seas, the Anostraca, or fairy shrimp, evolved within the branchiopod crustaceans. They moved from oceans up through…

Writers in the Woods, a companion series to our Community Voices interviews, focuses on authors and artists whose work relates to the forests of the Northeast. For the first interview in the…

One of the year’s first insects to appear on my deck railing is the winter firefly, Photinus corrusca, which shows up on warm days throughout winter. A brown beetle with pink parentheses…

This week in the woods, we discovered (via a remote camera trap) a Virginia opossum trundling back and forth from a derelict shed. On each return trip, it was carrying leaves with its tail.…

In May of this year, when a cottonwood measuring nearly 3 ½ feet in diameter and more than 100 feet tall fell across a trail in the Saint Michael’s College Natural Area, I saw the…

Goldenrods in bloom are the Grand Central Station for insects. Some insects come in search of nectar, others for pollen, more for mates, and still others are predators for whom the diverse…

This young Virginia opossum was skulking around the bushes near a house at night, as opossums often do. Despite sometimes being mistaken for large rats, they aren’t closely related to…

Twenty-five years ago, a student brought me a dead, tattered specimen of a moth. Its prodigious wingspan, colorfully banded fuzzy body, and spectacular wings were unmistakable: cecropia moths…

This Week in the Woods, spring has finally arrived. Volunteers are on standby, monitoring temperatures and nighttime rain forecasts, to predict when spotted salamanders, wood frogs and other…