By Anna Morris Last autumn, around the same time I was laying the winter quilt on our bed, my cat became very interested in the space beneath the kitchen sink. Unsurprisingly, a mouse was huddled down there, seeking shelter in the warmth. Though I was sympathetic, and all wildlife is welcome in our yard, I’d…

By Jen Weimer For many of us, this season involves hunting, gathering, and preparing for a long, cold winter. This often includes stacking (or restacking) the firewood that’s been seasoning while we enjoyed the laid back warmer months of summer. Humans have used wood as a source of heat since they learned to control fire…

By Conrad Baker Swift and apparently silent, a lone bat traces the contours of the woods’ edge at dusk, floating through canopy and meadow. In the last daylight, a sharp-eyed observer might catch a glimpse of white armpits, indicating that this is no barn bat or attic bat. This is an eastern red bat. Eastern…

By Rachel Sargent Mirus One neighbor calls our house “the spider house” because so many orb weavers spin webs outside our large living room windows. Our spiders work on their webs at dawn and dusk, and I watch their silhouettes against pastel skies as they move like aerialists – twisting, pulling, building, repairing. The orb…

By Rachel Sargent Mirus If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then surely the friend of my enemy is my enemy. This inverted cliche is one way to characterize the tangled relationship between ash trees and the ash-tree bolete. The ash-tree bolete (Boletinellus merulioides) is a fan-shaped brown mushroom with an off-center stem.…

By Elise Tillinghast During a late summer walk, I noticed that the common milkweed in our back field is becoming not-so-common. Once vigorous patches of the milky green plants have dwindled, engulfed in a sea of Canada goldenrod. Goldenrod is a habitat rock star, and during this walk, I counted at least 13 moth, wasp,…

Sunlight glinted off the water as we paddled our canoe along a winding channel which led through a marsh of tall grasses and wild rice. Two white, long-legged birds – great egrets – stalked the shallow water, poised to spear fish with their pointed bills. A bald eagle landed in a tree, squawking as it…

By Lee Emmons The brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) lives out its days in relative seclusion. Like the gray catbird, which has a similar fondness for thickets and shrubby areas, brown thrashers haunt areas of dense cover, although discerning eyes may be able to spot these birds within that habitat. Even when they’re out of sight,…

By Tim Traver This spring, we went the no-mow route on about a quarter-acre of our lawn, the last remaining groomed piece we hadn’t turned into vegetable garden or permanent meadow. What a relief! During the hottest, driest spells over the summer, the grass wasn’t growing anyway. The lawn we did mow during the drought…

The unexpected chemistry of lightning By Kenrick Vezina To say that lightning “splits” the sky is no mere poetry. A single stroke contains about one billion joules of energy, roughly 280 kilowatt-hours of electricity, and could power a modern American household for more than nine days. What’s more, it’s enough to blast apart the very…

By Laurie D. Morrissey On the New Hampshire lake where I spend much of the summer, loon calls are so common that I sometimes take them for granted. The sounds of the common loon (Gavia immer) are iconic of wilderness and have been described as haunting, plaintive, maniacal, other-worldly, even wolf-like. Recently, I’ve started listening…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul Among summer’s many sweet offerings are wild berries. And among these, blueberries are my favorite. Years ago, I took to carrying large, empty yogurt containers in my car – and smaller vessels in my backpack – so I would have something to fill should I pass a good berry patch. My…

By Declan McCabe Earlier this summer, I joined graduate school friend and beetle biologist, Kristian Omland, in search of the elusive cobblestone tiger beetle (Cicindela marginipennis). We loaded a canoe with insect nets, jars, and binoculars to view beetles while minimizing handling. Absent from our kit: entomologist’s killing jars. Ours was a catch-and-release mission. The…

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul Several years ago, I was awakened nearly every day of late spring by a recurring – and very loud – bird sound. I say “sound,” rather than “song” because this particular noise was not so melodious as the cheery whistling of the robin or the musical trilling of the hermit thrush.…

By Catherine Schmitt Some things are so familiar, so common, that they are often overlooked. Such is the case with northern white cedar (Thuja occidentalis). Also known as eastern white cedar, this tree grows throughout the Northeast, but only in certain places, in part because it has evolved many ways to live and grow that…