I can no more easily imagine a summer evening without bats overhead than the night sky devoid of stars…
On our small New Hampshire farm, we’ve always watched bats feeding over pastures and the adjacent Lane River wetlands. Now the specter of a rapid regional collapse of bat …
When autumn approaches, creatures great and small prepare for the winter ahead
After late autumn rains strip away the last bright maple leaves, and nights turn cold enough to drive hard frost deeper into the soil, New Englanders respond with instincts that mirror the activities …
I collect porcupine stories. It seems everyone who has lived in rural NH has got at least a few. The porcupine tale genre is predictable: disappearing garden or orchard produce, damage to structural lumber, repeated bouts of quills in noses of domestic dogs, and lastly, firearms. Often the tales …
The midwinter forest is an excellent place to start
The “Dark Skies” movement was created in opposition to pervasive, creeping nighttime light pollution that obscures constellations in urban areas. But what about noise …
The less we are able to admit common feelings into our relationship with trees, the more impoverished we become: it must indicate a deforestation of the spirit. Strangely enough, their least understood qualities lie in the sensate natures they share with the rest of life… We have hardly …
In the woods, each seasonal transition is accompanied by faint glimmers of what comes next and ghosts of each fleeting moment. Later sunrise and earlier sunset times now stagger in slow-motion toward an embrace they thankfully never reach. Field crickets chirp in lengthening darkness of …
On the eve of the first measurable December snowfall, a time of thin ice and rattling beech leaves, I joined three colleagues on a rugged bushwhack to a remote corner of a Society-owned forest reservation. It's not often that the conservation business is as tangible as it was that early winter …
