Follow the Trail with Bill Reid,
The Last Green Valley's Chief Ranger

“Nature is shy and noncommittal in a crowd. To learn her secrets visit her alone or with a single friend, at most. Everything evades you, everything hides, even your thoughts escape you when you walk in a crowd.” —  Edwin Way Teale, from “Circle of…

This week I begin my spring and summer volunteer work for the CT DEEP Wildlife Division to help monitor bats. This will be the fourth year I’m doing this work, and I have written about this important volunteer activity in past columns. Twice a month,…

“If the oak is the king of trees, as tradition has it, then the Eastern White Oak, throughout its range, is the king of kings.” — Donald Culross Peattie from “A Natural History of North American Trees” The last several years have been hard on…

“History, I like to think, is a larger way of looking at life. It is a source of strength, of inspiration. It is about who we are and what we stand for and is essential to our understanding of what our own role should be…

“All of nature is a going concern. The business of spring is a prospering. I stand for a long time beside the swamp stream in a fairyland setting of low-lying mist glowing and tinted with the pink of the sunrise. Here is beauty, here is…

“Hiking is not escapism; it’s realism. The people who choose to spend time outdoors are not running away from anything; we are returning to where we belong.” — Jennifer Pharr Davis, Explorer, Author, Speaker The first day of spring 2021 dawned as a glorious cloudless day…

“Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields— and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.” —…

“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”  — Rachael Carson, The Sense of Wonder Saturday, March 20 at 5:37 a.m. is the vernal equinox and the first day of…

“Now is that sweet unwritten moment when all things are possible, are just begun. The little tree has not quite leafed. The mate is not yet chosen. To the rambler in the woods all that he can find in heavy books will be of less…

“I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” — Henry David Thoreau, from “The Dispersion of Seeds,” 1860-1861 One of the joys of winter is the arrival of seed catalogs in…

This winter I’ve noticed a variety of winter bird species gathering in flocks at my feeder. Each year I expect to see several dark eyed juncos scouring the grass under our feeder. This year they arrived in late fall, right on time from nesting grounds…

“The next day, Friday morning, Brother Simpson took me down to the steamboat and started me for New York, giving me a letter directed to David Ruggles, of New York.”  From the Autobiography of James L. Smith, published in 1881 and reprinted by the Society…