By Tim Traver As a kid fidgeting at my grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, I often wondered, what’s the point of cranberries? She had a live-in Irish cook who insisted on serving whole cranberries suspended in a kind of gelatinous, inverted bog. […]
Category: The Outside Story
Column, The Outside Story
Water Scorpions: underwater assassins
By Declan McCabe Recently, my daughter participated in Odyssey of the Mind, a creative problem-solving competition devoted to ingenuity and team work. As an entomologist, I was thrilled to learn that the program calls its highest award the “Ranatra fusca.” […]
Column, The Outside Story
How do birds know when to migrate?
By Carolyn Lorié On the north end of my home is a nest site favored by eastern phoebes. Every year a pair shows up, sets up house, and raises a family. They arrive early in the spring, and I spend the […]
Column, The Outside Story
Vermont: running dry?
By Madeline Bodin Scenes from the West’s five-year drought are striking – the cracked mud at the bottom of a dry reservoir, forests in flames. Wonder what a drought would look like in Vermont and New Hampshire? Look out the […]
Column, The Outside Story
Fall Peepers
By Michael J. Caduto We like to think that everything in nature has its own particular time and place. But nature is fond of throwing us curves. As a naturalist, a common question I’m asked during foliage season is, “Why […]
Column, The Outside Story
An abundance of caution: wild food and risk
By Benjamin Lord “I’ve got a botanical question for you,” my friend said as he came into my classroom the other day. “Is black nightshade edible?” He’d found some growing near his chicken coop. “I took the tiniest bite,” he […]
Column, The Outside Story
Tobacco Hornworms: big, green, and in the garden
By Todd McLeish The big, meaty green caterpillars that many of us have been fighting to eradicate from our gardens this summer make plenty of people squirm. In part it’s because they are among the largest caterpillars in the region, […]
Column, The Outside Story
Cloudy with a chance of flies: non-biting midges
By Declan McCabe Clouds of tiny insects, rising and falling hypnotically along lake shores, contribute to the ambiance of warm summer evenings. My recent bike ride was interrupted by a lungful of this ambiance. If you find yourself in a […]
Column, The Outside Story
The dirt on roots
By Joe Rankin You can pretty much count on a tree to stay in one place, at least in the real world. Not so in fiction. Remember the walking, talking Ents in the Lord of the Rings movies? Or Groot, […]
Column, The Outside Story
Singing a different tune
By Laurie Morrissey Birdsong has always fascinated humans. Besides waking some of us up a wee bit too early in the morning, it has inspired musical compositions and immortal poetry. It has produced lush descriptions, like those of the early […]