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. […]
Category: The Outside Story
Eastern red bats migrating
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 […]
How to spin a spider web
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 […]
The tangled tale of the Ash-Tree Bolete
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 […]
How to grow milkweed for a monarch crop
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 […]
Freshwater marshes are biodiversity hotspots
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 […]
Brown thrashers skulk through thickets
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 […]
Rethinking the lawn
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 […]
Splitting the air
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 […]
Loon vocalizations are more than meets the ear
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 […]