By Elizabeth Farnsworth
As summer winds down, I find myself reflecting on the highways bustling with Winnebagos, camper vans, motor homes and silver, sleek, retro Airstream trailers. I’ve always been impressed with these portable abodes — how they can afford all the comforts of home on four wheels. Who says you can’t take it all with you? Well, humans aren’t the only creatures who carry their homes along for the ride. Among nature’s most amazing architects are some of our tiniest insects: the caddisflies.
By David Spector
On an August afternoon at home, my wife removed several impressively large caterpillars from our tomato plants. These animals were tobacco hornworms, common feeders on tomato (and tobacco) foliage.
By Ted Watt
Some years ago I lived on the campus of a Quaker retreat center near Greenfield. I had explored a lot of the forested areas around the facility, and the trails up and down the ridge had given me opportunities to see and hear some terrific warblers during spring migrations, along with the pleasure of just being and observing in nature. But I hadn’t ever really explored the cliffs. Then I read a lovely, nostalgic letter in The Recorder asking if there still were porcupine dens at the base of the cliffs, and I decided to investigate.
By Jessica Schultz
I met a widow whose style and grace captivated me. Her glossy black skin glowed, dimpled here and there, in all the appealing places. Long graceful legs extended from her body and moved with delicate flow. In the late afternoon, her short hair glinted sliver in the softening light. And her red tattoos, unique to her, made her an instantly recognizable standout in any crowd. She was, of course, a black widow spider — in particular, a southern black widow (Lactrodectus mactans), one of several species found in the United States. How she came to be here in Amherst was a mystery; she was found on a piece of firewood.
By Mary Kraus
There has been a fair amount of discussion in recent years about children being disconnected from the “real world”: the outdoors, trees, fresh air, rocks, bugs, soil. Our cultural norms seem to involve keeping children inside, plugged into a TV or playing with some complex manufactured toy that defines the game for them. It’s an expectation that each child should own innumerable toys, games and electronic devices, at significant financial and environmental expense. Children are suffering from a lack of time and space to run free, exploring the wide world outside, using their imaginations to turn twigs and pebbles into fairy houses, feeling the roughness of bark and the warmth of the sun under bare feet as they climb trees and clamber over boulders.
By Michael Dover
Longtime readers of this column may remember an essay from October 2010 by Annie Woodhull about the disappearance of honeybee colonies, a phenomenon dubbed colony- collapse disorder, or CCD. As she pointed out in that column, we depend on honeybees to pollinate a tremendous number of food crops. “Bees pollinate not only the vegetables and fruits that we eat, but clover for the cows, goats and sheep that make milk and cheese, and cotton plants for the clothes we wear,” she wrote. “[They] are responsible for one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat.”
By Joshua Rose
Science fiction is full of tales of humans who shrink, or tiny creatures that grow. Spiders, ants, and wasps become frightening monsters if we lose our size advantage. If I were in such a situation, one of the animals I would least like to see would be a tiger beetle.
By David Spector
At a meeting of the Hampshire Bird Club last June, a friend shared with me some pictures of snakes and offered to show me where she had seen them. The snakes were northern copperheads, a locally uncommon species I had never seen, so I was eager to take her up on the invitation. A few days later my wife and I joined our friend for a hike on a forested, rocky, uphill trail. Long before we reached our destination, the walk offered many other rewards.
By Lawrence J. Winship
I love planting daffodils. It is so satisfying to tuck away next spring’s promise in the fall as the days grow short and the soil cools. Horticultural bulbs are raised in fertile beds and are thus prepared to have all of the food and nutrients they need and all of their structures pre-grown, ready to expand into action with rising temperatures in the spring. Wild bulbs, tubers, rhizomes and corms, too, spend the winter growing roots, expanding, duplicating and, in some cases, sending up shoots to just below the frost line or even up into the snow pack. When I plant spring ephemerals, then, I try to be careful to get them at the right depth, where it will stay warmer, keeping in mind that most wild bulbs are found quite deep. While I do this, I often find myself wondering: While garden flowers have humans to do the planting, who plants wild bulbs and tubers? Squirrels? Elves? The real answer is even better — the bulbs do it themselves!
By Joshua Rose
Every person has his or her own way of recognizing the coming of spring — the first robin on the lawn, newly emerged skunk cabbage, the first spring peepers calling, or perhaps the “big night” when the salamanders migrate. For me, spring is not really in full swing until the dragonflies start flying.
Hitchcock Center for the Environment
at Hampshire College
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