A weekly feature on the timing of outdoor occurrences
Any New Englander worth their beans knows that coastal communities get long luxurious autumns and get less snow come winter, but why? This is all thanks to the strange properties of water and how it interacts with the atmosphere compared to land.
Frost forms when surface temperatures of objects dip below both the freezing and the dew points, causing instantaneous fuzzy ice to form on the surface of objects like our lovely garden plants.
A bright red ruby, about a half inch across, studded with rhinestones …or a shamrock orbweaver spider?
Seaside goldenrod is closely related to the other goldenrods you are likely more familiar with as they are in the same genus, Solidago, which comes from the Latin meaning “to make whole” due to its healing properties.
Grasshoppers seem cute and unintimidating until the variables that cause a locust swarm occur.
While many species of puffball are only the size of a marble or golf ball, the giant puffball certainly lives up to its name as a mature specimen can be as big as a large watermelon.
You can’t mistake these damselflies for anything else: the males have enchanting black wings while the females have dark charcoal-bronze wings, appearing black from afar, with a single white dot on each of the four wingtips.
Look for an orange, chunky, irregularly-shaped mushroom with a rough, dry texture. When sliced, the interior is white. This combination of being irregularly-shaped with a white interior and unique rough exterior are clues about the weirdness of this particular fungus.
Jewelweed shimmers like the finest polished silver but flags in the water’s dark current like the softest silk. What is this thing that is both a jewel and a weed? What kind of mad trickery is this?
For being fairly common visitors to harbors, bays, and fjords throughout their global temperate range, harbor porpoises are still rather a mystery to us. We know that during the summer months they stay in protected coastal waters as they hunt migrating schools of pogies, mackerel, squid, and pollock, among other fish. In the winter months, we are decidedly less sure of their habits.
