The Outside Story: Bohemian waxwings, intrepid winter wanderers

Walking along a dirt road last winter, I heard a collection of pleasant, sputtering trills coming from a stand of conifers and hardwoods nearby. I’m used to the winter conversation of chickadees around feeder and woods, the cawing of crows and blue jays in the yard, and the high-pitched calls of golden-crowned kinglets sounding from the trees in winter — but I didn’t recognize this sound.

When I think about winter survival, my mind first goes to wildlife: field mice curling up in nests, chickadees flocking to bird feeders, and amphibians burrowing into the mud.

During winter, I often hear gnawing and the scurrying of little feet inside the walls of our house. Mice have taken shelter in our old farmhouse again.

Tromping through our woods in December in search of a Christmas tree, I often notice an evergreen fern, one of the few green plants on the forest floor this time of year, other than young conifers. An easy fern to identify, it grows in fountain-like clump … (read more)

Standing on the berm of a small pond, I watch the resident beaver leave its lodge, a silhouetted nose moving through the water.

The great annual movements of fall include monarch butterflies winging toward Mexico, whales heading to the Caribbean to give birth, and multitudes of birds in the autumn skies. There’s another migration this season that often goes unnoticed by casual obs … (read more)

As the height-of-summer floral abundance fades, goldenrods and asters fill the landscape with hits of yellow, purple, pink, and white. Beyond the beauty they provide, these late bloomers are a critical food source for several native species of wild bees.

The sharpest contrast between rivers and lakes is in water movement. While rivers flow inexorably downhill, lake water movement is more subtle.

Frogs have hopped about Earth since before the time of the dinosaurs, and it shows. Celebrated for their amphibious lifestyle and cacophonous choruses, the long arc of frog evolution has yielded other awesome and efficient adaptations in organs from their … (read more)

In the cosmic dance of heavenly bodies, no phenomenon possesses the drama of a solar eclipse, when the moon passes directly between the sun and earth.

Boiling maple sap into syrup is a time-honored tradition in the Northeast, to the olfactory delight of anyone who has spent time in a steamy sugarhouse while inhaling the sweet maple scent of the season.

My yard is full of eastern white pine trees, and every three years or so, it is full of pine cones. This is one of those years. Pine cones have fallen all over the yard, the sidewalk, the driveway.

It’s deep in winter, and a nor’easter is dumping snow outside. In between the howling winds you hear a boom!

One winter day, while teaching a winter ecology class, I pulled on waders and rubber gloves, grabbed a catch net, and led my “Minibeasts of the Stream” program, discovering a rich variety of insects in the frigid waters of Kedron Brook in South Woodstock, … (read more)

Of all life’s synergies, I appreciate most the one between my propensity for domestic procrastination and my love of moving through the outdoors — countless adventures are born of it.