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…
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.
Hitchcock Center for the Environment
at Hampshire College
845 West Street | Amherst MA 01002 | 413.256.6006 | 413.253.2809 fax