This Week in the Woods

This week in the woods, this dark fishing spider fell out of a wood pile and onto a piece of target-practice paper. Our area’s other fishing spider species appear near permanent bodies…

This week in the woods, we’ve observed an abundance of insect life and birds that both depend on these insects and keep their populations in check. While other aphid species tend to…

This week in the woods, we saw what might be some of the year’s last blooms, poisonous plants, and a glut of caterpillars, all in Vershire, Vermont. A geranium species native to the…

This week in the woods, messes of flowers – American-asters, goldenrods, and more – give the last, late blooms of summer and feed bees, butterflies, and other insects still flying.…

This week in the woods, we try to follow the chaotic, speedy flights of sulphur butterflies over fields and along woodland edges. Difficult to chase down, highly variable, and often nearly…

This week in the woods, a paw print, claw marks, and scat all come from black bears, which enter a period of increased feeding activity called hyperphagia in the fall. We are most likely to…

This week in the woods, along the edge of a protected forest in West Fairlee, Vermont, thin-leaved sunflowers continued their long, radiant bloom. While also known as the ten-petal sunflower…

This week in the woods, a red eft ventured out of the leaf litter in defiance of the dry conditions and flaunted its orange skin, more luminous even than the impending fall foliage. You might…

This week in the woods, an ambush bug perched in patient silence, eyes bulging, as it awaited prey atop a white turtlehead blooming in Corinth, Vermont. Like little Nosferatus of late-summer…

This week in the woods, along the Linny Levin Trail through the Zebedee Wetlands in Thetford, Vermont, a number of blooms, berries, and butterflies were at or around their peak abundance.…

This week in the woods, we admired this transverse-banded drone fly accumulating Rudbeckia pollen. This common insect belongs to the family Syrphidae, also known as syrphid flies, flower flies…

This week in the woods, one-flowered wintergreen popped up everywhere in a shaded Topsham, Vermont, pine stand but didn’t want to grant us the privilege of seeing its face unless we got…

This week in the woods, in anticipation of Friday's third-annual Moth Ball at the Northern Woodlands offices in Lyme, we’re looking at some lepidoptera (three moths and a butterfly…

This week in the woods, our boots squelched as we made our way to a colony of twinflowers spreading beside a wetland in Strafford, Vermont. This weak woody “subshrub” – or…

This week in the woods, a number of plants showed their floral faces through the curtains of other leafy wetland growth. Three long twisted “flags” (a sepal up top and petals to…

This week in the woods, we found this yellow-headed looper moth hiding its titular head beneath a fold in a leaf. This moth also goes by the common names pitch pine looper and eastern pine…

This week in the woods, the starflower is the star. One of the most common spring bloomers in northeastern woodlands and tolerant of shade, the wildflower is blossoming all over the floors of…

This week in the woods, a black-throated green warbler, a bird more often high up in the forest canopy, deigned to visit us in the understory for a moment and sing its fitting song: I’m…

This week in the woods, we have our eyes and binoculars out for warblers – those remarkable little creatures that have migrated hundreds or thousands of miles over the course of several…