Magazine Articles
To Hear a Forest
One warm morning I took a break while hiking near Cardigan Mountain. I sat on a tent platform in an empty campsite and swung my boots over the platform edge. The leaves began to rustle, first faintly, then louder and louder, the way they do when the wind kicks up. I...
Strangers Helping in a Most Respectful Way
Wild ponies in the Grayson Highlands, southern Virginia. One hot July afternoon earlier this summer, my husband Nat and I were huffing up the Marlborough Trail on Mount Monadnock in southwestern New Hampshire. I spotted four men above me, heading down. I pulled myself...
My Secret Ledge
Photo of the ledge by Christopher Zajac for Estuary magazine. When I go there now, two or three times every week, I walk to the end of one road and trudge up a broken old woods road into the state forest. I step over ruts, where puddles linger long and narrow in dirt...
Long Island Sound to Lobsters: Is This Farewell?
A lobster from southern New England is offered for sale at the Fulton Fish Market in New York City in 1943. Source: Library of Congress archives Twenty years ago, Long Island Sound was home to a thriving fishery of the American lobster. Hundreds of lobster boats...
Fear of rattlesnakes
Biologist Tom Tyning scrambles up a ledge in Massachusetts, looking for rattlesnakes he will study in his lab and then return to the wild. The snakes are rare because poachers steal them and sell them illegally. (Photo by Christine Woodside) From Appalachia...
Encounter with a hare
Lepus americanus. Photo by Walter Siegmund. Past midnight I awakened and crept behind the mountain shelter, over dry leaves behind the back wall. Wind rustled from the open ridge of Vermont’s Mount Tom toward the spruces. I wore my improvised headlamp, a flashlight on...
