The Outside Story by Susie Spikol I fall in love easy. I’ve been mad about river otters and star-nosed moles, and of course the venomous short-tailed shrew. But my first love was a creature that is almost mythical, a shadow lingering on the edges of time. There wasn’t much of it, merely bones, teeth, scraps…

The Outside Story by Meghan Mccarthy McPhaul Woolly bear caterpillars seem to be everywhere these days – creeping across the lawn, along the road when I’m walking the dog, hidden in the wilted cut-back of the perennial garden. Last week I found a woolly bear curled up in a shoe I’d left on the front…

By Dave Mance III Act One opens in a forest on the western slopes of the Taconic Mountains in southwestern Vermont. A man in his 40’s is walking with his former high-school geology teacher – a man now in his 70’s. Amid the towering trees, they come across a VW bus-sized boulder, sitting alone and…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul A few winters back, a doe  frequented our compost heap. The garden fence around it proved an inadequate barrier, as she simply hopped over it to nosh on the rotting shards of jack-o-lanterns and the latest veggie scraps tossed atop the pile. Not far from the garden sits an old orchard,…

By Susan Shea On winter mornings when I look out my window, I often see a gray squirrel clinging upside down to the post supporting my bird feeder, with his front paws in the tray, munching sunflower seeds. Sometimes, a much smaller red squirrel is perched on the opposite side of the feeder. This brings…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul Had a unicorn pranced across the trail in front of me, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was one of those sparkly winter days, when snow drapes fir trees and glints across the landscape. I was at the top of Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch, and an undercast made…

By Declan McCabe Come mid-January, when I’m acclimatized to Vermont’s winter, I enjoy an occasional stroll on the icy surface of Lake Champlain. I favor bays sheltered from the brunt of winter winds where the ice has had ample time to thicken. I pull microspikes on over my boots and off I go. There’s room…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul The other day I was driving through New Hampshire’s Crawford Notch, where my eyes are usually drawn to the tall mountains and long, cascading waterfalls on either side of the road. But on this day my gaze shifted toward the snow banks lining the narrow highway. The sun was shining and…

By Carolyn Lorié Few things seem as remote as the January sun in northern New England. We see the light, but we feel almost no heat. In this way, winter can feel like a kind of exile – there’s a sense that the Earth has been flung to the farthest reaches of its orbit. The…

By Susie Spikol Some people keep lifelong birding lists. I’ve tried, but birds and I have never really hit it off. Too many colors, too many species, and I’m tone deaf, so birding by ear is completely beyond me. I do keep a lifelong weasel list. I can tell you exactly where I was when…

. By Laurie D. Morrissey There’s a giant living in northern Coös County, New Hampshire. It’s a 61-foot tall tree, the country’s largest known American mountain ash. At last measurement, it stood at a height of 61 feet and had a circumference of 70 inches. That’s outstanding for a tree that’s described by most sources,…

By Joe Rankin As if the emerald ash borer’s incursion into northern New England wasn’t enough, now there’s another potentially devastating forest pest marching this way: the southern pine beetle. Dendroctonus frontalis – the first name means “tree murderer,” we should note – is only a fraction of an inch long. But during outbreaks, they…

By Barbara Mackay The church service was about to begin when some breathless kids pulled me out of my seat to “come see this awesome, pretty, pink-and-yellow, fuzzy baby moth!” on the Sunday school door. It was a rosy maple moth, Dryocampa rubicunda, notable for its dipped-in-sherbet coloring. The moth’s coloring can vary from pink…

By Rachel Marie Sargent When I was little and tagging along when my dad tended his vegetables, I would sometimes find large black and yellow garden spiders. They were beautiful, and I noticed they had a curious trait: they often added a bright white decorative zigzag to their webs. I always wondered why, if a…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul The big white birds paddling gracefully across a Massachusetts pond last November surprised me. I’d grown up in the town I was visiting and had never seen swans there, although my friend assured me they were resident birds. The only mute swans I’d seen before, years ago, were floating along the…