Recently I found something odd in the grass, and so of course I took it inside to examine under the kitchen microscope. I thought it was some sort of moth cocoon – perhaps a candidate for the…

I have always admired turtles and their armored ways; how they bask in the sun and retreat when the world is too much. Last summer, through the perseverance of a nine-year-old boy, I found myself…

Ethan Pond, a small pond high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, is not only where a trout-fishing addiction began for me, but it’s also where some of the earliest observations of…

Forests are complex systems. The Earth’s climate is a complex system. When you put them together, you get something even more complex. Complexity upon complexity, as it were. It’s been…

Robert McCloskey’s Make way for Ducklings is one of my favorite childhood books. I loved the way Mr. and Mrs. Mallard interacted, their seemingly endless search for the perfect nesting place,…

The truck thermometer said 98 degrees in town – the hazy air thick enough you could chew it. By the time we turned off Route 7 onto a dirt road it said 93. Twenty minutes later, surrounded by…

Nests and eggs were frequent subjects of your June images - turtles, birds, wasps, and even a fungus "nest" were pictured. A Canada jay surveyed its domain, an enormous black snake slithered through…

Thanks to Felicia Harris for sending along this photo. First, a hint: It's not a bird you're likely to find in the forest. So now for a two-part quiz: Do you know what bird it is? And can you tell why…

Jens Hilke, a conservation planning biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood beside his colleague, James Brady, a biologist with the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans),…

A regular chore of mine is to dispose of the mice and moles trapped in our home. I place them on a 4 x 5-foot patch of dirt and rock – which I have named the grave site – beside my…

When I was little and tagging along when my dad tended his vegetables, I would sometimes find large black and yellow garden spiders. They were beautiful, and I noticed they had a curious trait: they…

Years ago, friends and I spotted a group of huge nests high in the trees along the edge of a large pond: a great blue heron rookery. From across the water (a respectful distance to avoid disturbing…

These three trees (left, center, right) each have scars facing each other. Why?

There’s been plenty said, and entire books written, about the importance of character. Any successful group, community, or society undoubtedly needs people of character in it. But life is a lot…

Jade Jarvis and Alyssa Valentyn were maintaining their research trail cameras at Saint Michael’s College when they noticed a brown smudge obscuring the lens of Camera 4. Alyssa used the corner…

North of Concord and south of the White Mountains is an estate romantically named Castle in the Clouds. Reclining on the patio there on a pleasant spring afternoon, you might enjoy the sun as well as…

For the past 150 years, various federal, state, and county agencies have done their best to erase coyotes from the American landscape. We have attacked them with guns, dynamite, and poison from every…

In this fascinating and well-researched history, scholar Silas Chamberlain traces the evolution of hiking in America from the early 1800s to today. He describes how romantic and transcendental writers…

Long an admirer of oaks, I was pleased to receive a copy of arborist William Bryant Logan’s book for Christmas last year. In its 300 pages about acorns and the people who ate them, about oak…

His assignment was to train gauchos to be loggers. That’s what the Peace Corps hoped Brett Chedzoy would accomplish in Argentina in the 1990s. “I wasn’t too successful,”…