Nature's year

I drove to Cape Cod with travelers from everywhere. I came to this narrow peninsula over the blistering, insatiable roads of America with the summer crowd--in my shirt sleeves,...

A yellow jacket tugs furiously at a dead cricket on the road, like a hungry dog with raw meat. Delicate aphids waver on flower stalks. A big striped cicada killer roams through...

Further along the shore a group of gray and white herring gulls stand into the wind. Hiding in a clump of peat-rooted grasses a few hundred feet from them is a gull in its first...

I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying part of an apple up a slope toward its h...

That great bonfire of a maple tree--one special to my boyhood--that I used to marvel at in the New Hampshire fall, is here replaced by second-or third-growth oaks. I now live in...

The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is full of the collaborative music of air...

I come home one night under vast black reaches full of stars, almost as thick as wet snowflakes. It is very still around me, a cold stillness through the ground, but overhead th...

On the Cape’s south side, facing the heavy Atlantic swells and breakers, the high cliffs are often covered with miniature scrub oak forests, or thickets--they are scarcely more...

For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more birds will die. Because this Temperate Z...

Then there was a boy who characterized the blue jay as being “the loudest bird in the East,” which may have brought the jay out of the realm of science but not accuracy.

And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like standing clouds in open woods and valle...

The effort has been made, the strength achieved. In the past three months we have gone from death to birth, to unfettered growth, and have already forgotten what a great and ela...