The change of season from winter to spring is a welcome time of year, with our ice-covered Valley landscape a distant memory. Although we routinely benefit and suffer from the attributes of ice, we pretty much take it for granted.
By David Spector
The thrill or, from some perspectives, the annoyance, of being awakened by bird song raises questions for the inquiring naturalist. What is that dawn chorus of avian voices? Why does a bird sing at dawn?
By John Sinton
While researching the natural history of our Valley on a spring day some years ago, I happened to be complaining about that noxious invasive, Japanese knotweed, to my dear late friend Elizabeth Farnsworth, who told me that I could not write about invasive plants without writing about natives as well. This led to an argument about what the first invasives were after Colonial settlement and whether one could imagine a purely native vegetative state (pun intended).
By Ted Watt For the Gazette
Spotted salamanders are iconic for many people. Shiny, black and yellow, 7- to 9-inch long amphibians, they live underground for 11 months of the year as top predators of the soil community. Mating and laying eggs in vernal pools, they then return to the forest soils, sometimes crossing roads in the process. How can we help these animals when they cross roads to get to and from their breeding pools? How can we assist them into an uncertain future? This is where salamander migration tunnels fit in.
By Lawrence J. Winship
For a short few days in the early spring, ghostly clouds of delicate flowers dance briefly among the leafless trees in our local hardwood forests. Look carefully and you’ll find that these clouds are scattered individuals of a small understory tree called shadbush, so named because it fruits in June when the shad return to our rivers.
By David Spector For the Gazette
Take a toy football, coat it with glue, then roll it in dead leaves. At one end attach a narrow wooden dowel and two large black buttons. The result: a model timberdoodle, or American woodcock.
By Joshua Rose For the Gazette
For many of us, our most intimate interaction with birds is through feeding them. At our feeders, we can witness the comings and goings of migration, vivid breeding plumage molting into low-key winter colors, new fledglings learning to fly and feed themselves, even death.
By Patrick O’Roark
In nature there are many signs that spring is approaching. Beautiful sights (such as blossoming wildflowers) and sounds (like the increasing variety of bird songs) fill us with happy anticipation of the warmer weather and longer days to come. But nature’s signs of spring aren’t limited to the traditionally beautiful. The creeping, crawling and slithering creatures of the forests and fields are also responding to the warmer temperatures and longer days. Common garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) will soon be emerging en masse from their winter refuges in a remarkable annual spring event.
By Katie Koerten
Recently I’ve been doing engineering and design workshops with third-graders. At the Hitchcock Center for the Environment, w e’re known for our educational programs about nature and sustainability. But all of us Hitchcock Center educators are also doing programs on engineering and design; it is curriculum that fosters confident, innovative thinking — crucial to tackling the problems facing the natural world.
By Christine Hatch For the Gazette
“What are you going to do about the wall of water coming down the river?” The call still rings in the ears of Deerfield Select Board Chair Carolyn Ness. The sun was already shining, the storm had passed, people were out in kayaks — and yet a 30-foot-high wall of water, the accumulation of rain from all of the upstream watersheds, was on its way downriver.
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Hitchcock Center for the Environment
at Hampshire College
845 West Street | Amherst MA 01002 | 413.256.6006 | 413.253.2809 fax