The Outside Story

In late autumn, cold air masses come barreling down from the Canadian Arctic like an atmospheric avalanche, bringing with them a visitor from the North: the rough-legged hawk (Buteo lagopus).…

Every holiday season there is a mass migration of humans towards home and family. We use many tools to help us navigate back to the places we’re from – from simple maps to…

A few nights ago, I heard a crash on the front porch and flicked on the light to reveal a black bear’s reflective eyes. It lorded over the contents spilling out of our overturned floor…

Last week, during a walk in the woods, I turned towards soft sounds in the understory and saw a small porcupine waddling through fallen oak and maple leaves. Porcupines have terrible eyesight…

At this point in the season, most migrating songbirds and raptors have already left. But on lakes and ponds across New England, some loons are still fishing and paddling. Loon parents may set…

Most people know that the bottom of a northern lake or large pond is a mucky, muddy mess of weeds, decayed leaves, some rocks, and a few crayfish to avoid stepping on while wading. This area…

On a recent walk in the Maine woods, I heard a red-breasted nuthatch calling softly to itself. It was 6 feet above me in a large white pine, climbing down the tree headfirst. Looking through…

In darkness, a wormlike creature squirms. A tiny nematode weaves its way between grains of rock and particles of organic matter, through inverted forests of tree roots. It follows what it…

On an otherwise unremarkable day in 2023, Jason Love and his colleagues were gathering in a parking lot when they saw something that, as far as we know, no one had ever seen before. Love, the…

The coming of autumn often makes trees harder to identify – but sometimes, it does the opposite. The black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) is a case in point. In summer, its bluish-green,…

As autumn nears, I find myself returning to botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s line in Gathering Moss where she describes ecological succession as “a tale of the interwoven fates of…

The staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is a ubiquitous shrub of human-impacted northeastern habitats. Sumac stands occur along most highways and county roads, as well as in disturbed areas and…

When I imagine scientists discovering new animals, I picture them traveling to far-off jungles or remote mountaintops – not investigating local roadsides, utility cuts, or other edge…

A yellowthroat warbler sang, “witchety, witchety, witch,” as I carefully made my way through the tangle of an alder swamp one afternoon not long ago. I looked about, hoping to…

Among the blooming perennials of late summer is one that guards its secrets closely. The lockbox blossoms of white turtlehead (Chelone glabra), a native plant in the plantain family, are an…

Perhaps you saw the flyers at your town office or a warning sign posted at your favorite swimming hole. The smell might have driven you home, but maybe you crept closer – unable to see…

Survey the insects orbiting a globe of milkweed blossoms or the delicate blooms of a chokeberry, and you might spy an apparent chimera. It looks a bit like a bee, perhaps a tad like a wasp,…

Twenty years ago, at this time of year, I found myself walking the margin of a marsh in east-central Vermont with Bob Popp, Vermont’s state botanist at that time. We had traveled to that…

A few summers ago, I was walking my dog in a pasture near my house when a butterfly landed on my bare leg. It was a medium-sized black butterfly with orange crescents along the margins of its…

Every summer I go blueberry picking and I notice the many colors of blueberries, from the luminous indigo of unpicked berries on a bush, which turn nearly black after handling, to the deep…