By Elizabeth Farnsworth For the Gazette
The first time I really began to appreciate the clever ways in which animals hide themselves was when I looked closely at a pile of bird poop. A glob of whitish-gray ick, plopped on a leaf. OK, so I’m a biologist who might have (professional) reasons to look closely at bird poop. There’s a career out there for everyone, right?
By David Spector
Pioneer, fugitive, invasive, colonist, weed. Each of these words evokes images and emotions in a reader, and each has a meaning, indeed broadly overlapping meanings, for ecologists.
By Ted Watt
Sometimes we have to travel around the globe to gain new insights into the amazing variety of adaptations in nature; at other times, the opportunity for this awareness is right under our noses. One day I came upon an eye-opening example of adaptation while working at my desk.
By Jessica Schultz
Walking through the forest one summer day on Brushy Mountain in Leverett, I found myself standing on a woods road, looking down on a patch of dirt dotted with perfectly round holes. At first glance, the black holes appeared to be an empty mystery. But I waited and watched, and was rewarded with a series of micro-observations of a previously unnoticed world of insects that dig, hunt and, incidentally, provide a valuable service to us.
By Elizabeth Farnsworth
Ah, spring is in the air: lengthening days, mild breezes, bees a-buzz. To me, the most wonderful aspect of this season is the green-up, when nature throws off its brown and gray cloak and becomes awash in color. Much of this exuberant celebration takes place on the forest floor, where herbaceous plants bloom in profusion.
By Henry Lappen
As spring unfolds, many of us feel the urge to plant. But then we go into a nursery or garden center and are surrounded by thousands of plants. How does one choose?
By David Spector
Abbreviations used in email and texting, such as FWIW and IMHO, form an odd group of languages with each electronic subculture having its own jargon. Birdwatchers are no exception. At this season, early in the year with many birds moving north to their breeding grounds, the online world of birdwatchers is increasingly filled with the abbreviation “FOY,” as people note the first time in a year they encounter a bird species — a First Of Year bird: a FOY.
By Elizabeth Farnsworth
It’s March, and the woods are still drab, except for the wind-tossed evergreens, the landscape mostly cloaked in grays and browns. Today, the brightest member of my neighboring woods is a red fox — a flash of orange, white and black, now vanishing into the middle distance amid the trees.
By Lawrence J. Winship
Especially in low, wet areas and along streams under trees, you can find dozens poking up through the snow. Not really visitors from another planet, each fleshy sheath, called a spathe, hides the hundred or so flowers of the skunk cabbage Symplocarpus foetidus, the most northerly species of the diverse and very ancient arum family. (Arums show up in the fossil record in rocks formed before the breakup of the continents, and before the demise of the dinosaurs.)
By Reeve Gutsell
Whatever you’re doing, stop for a moment. Look out the window at the nearest patch of woods. What do you see? Perhaps a pair of squirrels racing up an oak tree? Some chickadees perched in a white pine? Maybe a stand of beeches or hemlocks? Now, consider what you don’t see — not because of your particular angle of view, or your specific location. Instead, consider what you don’t see because it’s not there to be seen, no matter where you look — for instance, passenger pigeons, eastern elk and towering stands of American chestnut.
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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