By Elizabeth Farnsworth For the Gazette
Recently, I had a startling close encounter with a turkey. One morning, I woke up to a loud crash like a gun shot. I leapt to my feet and looked around. Not detecting anything amiss, I was just about to return to bed when I was startled again, by the doorbell. A neighbor informed me that a turkey had just flown into my front window!
By Joshua Rose For the Gazette
When we move to a new house, we want to know who are neighbors are. On Oct. 1, the Hitchcock Center held the grand opening for its new home at Hampshire College in Amherst. But Hitchcock naturalist Ted Watt couldn’t wait to start exploring the new site. So, back on June 18, 3½ months before the grand opening, Ted invited other nature lovers to join him for a “bioblitz” of Hitchcock’s home-to-be.
By David Spector For the Gazette
Each animal needs information about the world to help regulate both its internal environment and its relationships with the external environment. The various senses, different for each species, provide this information.
By Katie Koerten
In 2012, I attended a conference at which Oberlin College professor David Orr spoke of “life in a greenhouse world.” One thing we’ll need to do, he said, was to “neighbor as a verb.” The concept of neighborliness as a response to climate change has stuck with me ever since. It made a lot of sense to me that being good neighbors will strengthen us and make us more resilient in an uncertain future.
By Ted Watt
I’ve been birding in Massachusetts for quite a while. I remember in the 1960s noticing more mockingbirds, cardinals and tufted titmice during the winter as one year flowed into the next. “Why are these southern birds coming to New England?” I would occasionally ask myself.
By Elizabeth Farnsworth
This summer, I’ve had the pleasure to go out often in the field with a close friend to engage in a treasure hunt. No, we’re not geocachers or Pokémon Go players; we’re botanists, and we’re searching for rare plants.
By Benjamin Weiner
Sometime in early March, I noticed that the ground around my chicken coop and kitchen garden was littered with gray needles, and, looking up, it occurred to me that the fir tree might be dead.
By Lawrence J. Winship and Josia Gertz DeChiara For the Gazette
Field walks in the forest ecology class at Hampshire College in Amherst were often like murder mysteries, in very slow motion. Which trees were thriving, which were diseased, which had died — and what was the prime suspect?
by Lawrence J. Winship
What made the pine trees take such an odd, curvy shape? In short, snow and ice! But there is much more to the story. Several factors came into play, in the correct sequence, to shape the trees, and perhaps that is why their appearance is so startling and rare.
By Casey Beebe
Imagine what our world would be like if this is what we all believed, if this is how we thought…
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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