By Elise Tillinghast My friend Gordon Russell sent me a letter recently describing a wildlife encounter. He had been following deer tracks along a stone wall when a movement caught his attention. “Almost before its image could travel to my brain,” he wrote, “the white head of a weasel vanished in between the stones.” The…

By Joe Rankin It’s still the middle of winter, but the sun is climbing higher each day and I know that it won’t be long until my honeybees are out seeking nectar and pollen. From early-blooming red maple trees. Then sugar maples, apple trees, dandelions. From blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. From clover, staghorn sumac, and…

By Rachel Sargent The bare ground of the trail wound through dead leaves and patchy snow. At a short overhang in the trail, I noticed spiky threads of ice growing up from the soil in crunchy clusters. A careless boot revealed how fragile these formations are; the fine ice threads crumbled readily. This was needle…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul At this time of year, many a gardener’s daydreams turn to the springtime promise of sprouting plants. Seed catalogs start arriving in the mail months before the soil will be thawed and drained enough for planting, and we use this downtime to plan for the coming season. At Green Fire Farm…

By Joe Rankin On cold winter days, while feeding sticks of firewood into my woodstove, I sometimes pause, my eye caught by lichens. Splotchy circles, lacy tendrils. Soft gray, muted gray-green, black. They mottle the bark. When I look out the window next to my desk, I see splashes of lichen on the roof of…

By Thomas Ames, Jr. “The Boke of St. Albans,” a 15th century sportsman’s handbook, decreed that only a nobleman could hunt with a falcon, but a mere yeoman might settle for a goshawk. “In the talons there was death,” wrote T. H. White, who famously chronicled in “The Goshawk” his naive attempt to “man” one…

By Madeline Bodin In the photo, the mountain lion lies on its side on the shoulder of a Connecticut parkway. Taillights shine in the distance. A Connecticut state trooper snapped the photo after a motorist had struck and killed the animal on a June night in 2011. Wildlife biologists quickly confirmed this mountain lion was…

illustration for this column was drawn by Adelaide Tyrol By Laurie Morrissey Last night, the floodlights were on at my favorite skating lake. Several children wearing plastic skates and shiny helmets were gliding on the ice, shepherded by young parents. A father pulled a Nordic-looking sled with upturned runners, his bundled-up cargo insisting, “More!” each…

  By Tim Traver During a mild winter in northern New England, there are those of us who rejoice over our lower heating bills and those who scan the forecast, hoping for cold and snow. In a classic El Niño year like this one, when we often get unseasonably mild weather well into February, there…

Crow communication is cawfully complicated By Joe Rankin “Caw! Caw!” Every spring we hear it. And my wife says, “that’s My Crow.” It’s apparently the bird’s name. She capitalizes it in her tone. I think she hasn’t bestowed a more formal name because she doesn’t know whether it’s a male or female. My Crow is…

By Dave Mance III If you’re a hunter who’s ever ordered something from a sporting goods company, it’s probably safe to assume that you’ve been inundated with catalogues over the past four months. God help you if you save your seed catalogues, too. If you take a moment to flip through your now complete seasonal…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul For several days last winter, a barred owl perched atop a dead white birch tree in our field. As winters go, last year’s was very cold, and the owl puffed up against the stubbornly below-freezing temperatures, its streaky brown and white feathers fluffed and fluttering in the icy breeze. Occasionally the…

By Declan McCabe By December, foliage season is long over for us humans, but it’s peak season under the water. Last month, as the last bus of tourists departed for home, fallen leaves accumulated in our streams and rivers, starting a process that’s critical for the nourishment of everything from caddisflies on up the food…

By Rachel Sargent The oyster mushroom: delicious, frequently spotted on veggie pizzas, and predatory. That’s right. The hyphae of many fungi, including the oyster mushroom, attack and paralyze prey. Then, as R. Greg Thorn of Western University enthusiastically described, the fungi “grow down their throats and digest them from the inside.” Oyster mushrooms live in…

By Michael J. Caduto There was a time in the waters known by the Abenaki peoples as Kwenitegok, “Long River,” when migratory fish moved in such multitudes that their backs appeared as a living bridge from shore to shore. After the glacier melted, shad and alewives returned to migrate up our rivers for 10,000 years,…