The Outside Story

If you take to the water this spring, there’s a good chance you’ll spot a great blue heron, New England’s most recognizable large wading bird. But you might also see one of several other similar species that breed in or pass through our region’s wetlands. Telling these large waders apart can be tricky. What distinguishes…

The Outside Story By Decan McCabe The sharpest contrast between rivers and lakes is in water movement. While rivers flow inexorably downhill, lake water movement is more subtle. Anyone who has weathered a storm on a lake, however, can attest that less consistent water movement does not mean no water movement at all. In fact,…

Frogs have hopped about Earth since before the time of the dinosaurs, and it shows. Celebrated for their amphibious lifestyle and cacophonous choruses, the long arc of frog evolution has yielded other awesome and efficient adaptations in organs from their lungs to their skin. Research on green tree frogs demonstrates that frog lungs also assist…

  By Jackie Bussjaeger In the wild, finding a suitable mate is no simple matter — and it’s an extra complicated affair for one familiar resident of the woods and underbrush. With its chunky build, boldly striped head, and namesake white throat, the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) is among the most common and recognizable birds…

Boiling maple sap into syrup is a time honored tradition in the Northeast, to the olfactory delight of anyone who has spent time in a steamy sugarhouse while inhaling the sweet maple scent of the season. It used to be that trees were tapped in late March, and evaporators in sugar houses fired up in…

There’s a new invasive insect zigzagging its way across North America. First reported by citizen scientists in Quebec in 2020, the elm zigzag sawfly (Aproceros leucopoda) has now spread to North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. This new pest, which is native to Asia, has the potential to cause major…

In a big mast year for oak trees, it seems like there’s a constant barrage of acorns thwacking roofs, parked cars, and — sometimes — unsuspecting humans. These falling nuts can seem a nuisance. But when I look closely at a little acorn with its tidy hat and imagine its future, I’m reminded of what…

When it comes to winter in the North Country, brown is not beautiful. Climate change has brought sudden and extreme fluctuations in weather along with a dramatic decline in the amount of snowfall that blankets the ground. This is especially marked in the Northeast, where winter is warming faster than the national average. Our weather…

  Last February, several evening grosbeaks, which we rarely see here, visited our feeder. About the size of robins, the males were yellow with black and white wings, a black tail, and a bright yellow band above the eyes. The females were silver-gray with tinges of yellow and similar coloration to the males on the…

Bright red, soft, and velvety … no, I’m not describing a Valentine’s Day decoration, but a red velvet mite. Built like eight-legged, scarlet Beanie Babies, red velvet mites are hard to miss, even though most of them are no bigger than an eighth of an inch long. They are arachnids in the family Tombidiidae, so…

You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his  hands, he looks in on me… So wrote Robert Frost in his poem “The Star-splitter.” The aesthetic wonder of this easy-to-find constellation and its twinkling starlight have captured the imagination of countless stargazers. But the…

My yard is full of Eastern white pine trees, and every three years or so, it is full of pine cones. This is one of those years. Pine cones have fallen all over the yard, the sidewalk, the driveway. The neighborhood wildlife seem pleased by this bounty. A resident gray squirrel has made a fallen…

  In mid-winter 1988, I went contra-dancing at the Congregational Church in Lyme, New Hampshire. During intermission, I joined other dancers who stepped out of the overheated hall into a star-studded night alive with shimmering waves of color, from blue to pinkish-red. We stood in awe, while luminous curtains of light performed a pas-de-deux across…

 Most winters, a few sparrows visit my yard, feeding on the seeds I scatter on the ground near my bird feeder. These particular sparrows have long tails, rusty crowns and eye-lines on their gray heads, and a distinctive dark breast spot. Looking more closely, I’ve noticed buff-colored patches on the sides of their pale breasts,…

By Colby Galliher It’s deep in winter, and a nor’easter is dumping snow outside. In between the howling winds you hear a boom! Maybe a heap of snow fell from the roof, you think, or a giant icicle crashed from the eaves. A few minutes later, another boom pounds through the blizzard’s gales. It’s closer…