This Week in the Woods

This week in the woods, the summer canopy is rapidly closing, which means that the window of opportunity to easily observe summer forest birds is closing, too. Scarlet tanagers are especially…

This Week in the Woods, bald eagle chicks are growing quickly, and by this point, many have shed their white baby fuzz. The eaglet in this nest (photographed with a high magnification lens…

This Week in the Woods, hermit thrushes are back and flitting around in pairs, with stops along the way to rummage in leaf litter for tasty invertebrates. One of the key identifying traits of…

This week in the woods, one of our most exquisite spring ephemeral wildflowers is starting to bloom. Bloodroot — a member of the poppy family that gets its name from the red juice in its…

Most weeks, this blog covers relatively easy-to-see species. This week, we’re making an exception, for a happy reason: this past week, a team of volunteers documented four-toed…

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…

This week in the woods, we’re at a seasonal tipping point, when there’s still snow blanketing many areas, but on sunny, south-facing slopes, the first wildflowers are blooming. We…

This week in the woods, we’re sharing a mostly-bird themed post, along with a timely PSA that despite the snowy conditions, bears are waking up. Wildlife biologists recommend bringing in…

This week in the woods, we persuaded two eye-rolling teenagers to accompany us out to a roadside swamp, where we gave them a long lecture on the wonders of skunk cabbages. The rosy spathes of…

This week in the woods, if all this mud and snow has you feeling a bit desperate to see flowering plants, consider cutting some red maple stems and putting them in a jar of water on a window…

This Week in the Woods, we were delighted to see this eastern bluebird pair, a few yards away from an available bird house. Bluebirds are partial migrants, and during a mild winter season,…

This week in the woods, we discovered this pileated woodpecker excavation in a dead tree, with wood chips and dislodged tinder polypore conks scattered around the tree’s base. If you…

This Week in the Woods, we finally climbed up a steep hillside to collect photos from a game camera near a log, where different species urinate, rub scent glands, and otherwise leave their…

This week in the woods, we took a walk along the Ompompanoosuc River, where this winter’s ongoing temperature swings have created debris fields of ice shards. These start during a thaw…

This week in the woods, we discovered this barred owl napping below the eaves of a barn. We took these images from approximately 20 yards away, using a zoom lens, to avoid disturbing the…

This week in the woods, we found occasional mixed winter flocks of titmice, chickadees, and nuthatches, as well as this male hairy woodpecker, which was busily harvesting soft-bodied…

This Week in the Woods, we spotted a red crossbill, shown here in silhouette far, far away on the top of a tree, where he’d been calling incessantly. In the silhouette, you can easily…

This week in the woods, the arrival of snow means a shift in wildlife activity, and also the greater visibility of some more subtle sights as they become more obvious against a stark white…

This week in the woods, for our last post of 2023, we’re celebrating one of our most common and beautiful bird species: the blue jay. These brazen, intelligent birds – members of…

This week in the woods, we found a flock of house finches in a thicket, and this male bird was obliging enough to hop up on a perch and show off his rosy red plumage. Although nowadays house…