When our lilacs bloom in late May, pale yellow butterflies with black stripes arrive to feed on their nectar. These are tiger swallowtails. These exquisite butterflies have a broad black band along the edge of their forewings bordered with yellow dots. They also have small red spots and “tails” at the base of their hindwings.…

  In the shallow margins of many lakes and ponds in June and July, you may spot male sunfish guarding their nests. The sunfishes (family Centrarchidae) comprise many well-known species — including largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, rock bass, and black crappie — but the most visible nest guarders in early summer are the pumpkinseed, bluegill,…

  If you take a walk through a thick, broadleaf forest on a cool summer morning, you might recognize the cascading, metallic song of a thrush called a veery. It is an ethereal sound that echoes through the understory, like the ring of a haunted cell phone. You might even see a veery, with its…

  Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,  And here on earth come emulating flies,  That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart Achieve at times a very star-like start...  —Robert Frost, “Fireflies in the Garden” It happens on a warm June evening: in the…

  On a foggy morning walk, it may seem as if the spider webs on your path have turned into jeweled wonders, every thread a string of gems as smooth as pearls and as sparkling as diamonds. Each of these “jewels” is a drop of water the web has collected from the misty air. As…

  We’ve all heard the idiom, “The early bird gets the worm.” When it comes to invasive jumping worms, unfortunately, there are more than enough to go around. These invasive worms can consume excessive amounts of organic matter and leaf litter in a garden or forest, to the point that it becomes uninhabitable to native…

 While planting the vegetable garden last May, I heard a repeated bird song emanating from the adjacent raspberry patch: “Pleased, pleased, pleased to MEETCHA.” Finally, the small songster perched near the tip of a raspberry cane, its tail cocked. The bird’s yellow crown, black mask, olive back with black streaks, and white breast with rusty…

Hear ye, hear ye! The queens have emerged! We’re talking about bumble bees (genus Bombus). For several weeks each spring, any bumble bee you see is a queen – and very hard at work. She must construct her kingdom. Her mother (the previous queen), and most of her siblings will have perished. Unlike honey bees,…

Why do ants suddenly appear every time spring is near? Just like bees, they long to be close to you – especially if your home is made of wood. Carpenter ants (genus Camponotus) and the eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) both nest in wood and are frequent visitors to my log home. The Northeast is…

   Call it a flower or call it a weed – clover is a plant everyone knows. Who hasn’t idled away an hour hunting for a four-leaf clover, hoping for good luck? A member of the legume family, clover is common in lawns and fields, in disturbed sites, and along roadsides. Of the world’s 300…

Years ago, when I worked at a nature center in Connecticut licensed to care for injured and orphaned wildlife, a baby opossum was brought to us. It was found lying on a golf course, and was too young to be on its own. We named the opossum Alice and estimated it was 9 weeks old.…

I’m often tempted to peek at the eggs inside a phoebe’s nest when the parents leave it to forage for food. I’ve picked up a fallen robin’s egg shell and admired its delicate color and smoothness. I’ve marveled at the primal determination of the chick that pecked its way out of an egg to become…

Bring in the bird feeders – and other ways to avoid bear-human conflict It is a question I face each year as March winds into April: when to take down the bird feeder. Our avian feeding station is basic: a single run-of-the-mill hopper, which I fill with a local mix of seed that seems to…

By Anna Morris Among the very earliest signs of spring are the strange caterwauls of the barred owls that haunt our woods: “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” Their hooted conversations, thrown back and forth through forests all over New England, signal the territory disputes, nest-site advertisement, and pair bonding that begin…

By Kenrick Vezina With spring creeping closer, our year-round avian residents such as cardinals and titmice are already raising their voices. But there’s more than one way to make music, and birds have evolved means for using everything at their disposal to fill our forests with whistles, twitters, and booms – no voice needed. Early…