Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

Imagine standing in a white pine forest while warm rays from the sun flow over your arms, neck, and face. The trees sway gently in the wind as you close your eyes, your outer layers wrapped in a pleasant heat. The air is thick with moisture as plants breathe silently around you. In the higher branches, a sound grows loudly, radiating over the entire canopy, as if ringing out of the sun itself. Another voice cries out and then another and another, until a roaring chorus blooms over the treetops. And just as quickly as it grew, like a wave retreating from shore, it pales and fades back into the branches. White pines in Lincoln, MA The summer months allow us to experience long sunny days, that power rushing thunderstorms, cooling our neighbourhoods for a brief respite from the heat and humidity. Outdoor recreation spikes with people from all walks of life wanting to escape their homes for a date with the sun. All the while, they are serenaded by secretive musicians in the trees as...

Sycamore in the Stony Brook I feel like every once in a while you can appreciate nature in small doses. Nature has become big and that's not just because it's marketing team got better (we can thank National Geographic for that certainly). People wanting to "experience" the great outdoors, buying organic food, life listing rare and unusual species, hunting locavores (as in locavores hunting for wild food, not Ted Nugent's third favorite thing to shoot from a helicopter), and many other grandiose and specific things. Taking a sip While it certainly feels amazing knowing just how maple sap rises due to temperature fluctuations or why amphibians can breathe through their skin, taking time to appreciate a moment of pure presence can impress upon someone all the more. Take for example Monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ). You see them gliding along passageways of tarmac and concrete, flapping furiously along roadsides looking to refuel not at Micky D...

As January comes to a close and the new year continues on, I have taken some time to look for a common bird that everyone seems to notice, but rarely talks about. No, I'm not talking about feeder birds like titmice or finches, or ducks and geese that winter on our shores, or common city birds like sparrows. This bird can be seen with regularity soaring over any farm field, scanning a highway corridor at rush hour, or sitting on a wire like this one I saw at Kaveski Farm Conservation Land in Concord, MA. It is the Red-tailed Hawk ( Buteo jamaicensis ) and while they are as easy to see as I've described, I feel like they are often overlooked as well. Maybe it's because they're so common that the people that see them so often get used to them. Even in recent years as I became more of a birder than a naturalist, I would note where a given species was and then move on to the next one I saw or heard. It wasn't until I read and then reread Lyanda Lynn Haupt's Cro...