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

By all accounts October has been a spectacular year for foliage. At this writing the trees appear to be in peak color, with most of our large sugar maples sporting bright yellow and orange coats with splashes of red. The red maples are shimmering scarlet,…

Plants have long traveled the world with humans, purposefully transported and planted in regions they had never grown before. The early colonists brought plants, fruit trees, grasses and grains to the new world, just as corn (maize), squash and beans grown by the Indigenous peoples…

A lonely, male ring-neck pheasant moved onto my property in early May. I say lonely in pure human speculation, but also because he is the only pheasant we have seen and his loud penetrating kok-cack call emanating from our back pasture seems to be asking…

“On such a day as this everything is beautiful and pensive at once. There is a hint of sadness in the transient glory of these soon-departing colors. This is the culmination of the beauty of our northern year. Now in a relentless few days, in…

I first heard them on Monday, September 12th, the unmistakable cacophony of Canada geese heading south, their honking calls urging them onward. I watched as the tightly gathered, V-shaped aerial squadron sliced through the sky and out of sight. I am not sure if this…

Don’t let the title of this column fool you. Despite the title of apple snails, I am not sharing the latest escargot recipe offered up at a fancy restaurant here in The Last Green Valley. Today’s column is about a recently discovered invasive species –…

Here comes Walktober! “I return with tautness gone, with delight in simple things heightened, with a sense of health and sanity and well-being. I feel more calm, more capable. I have been in contact with the enduring and the real. Cares have shrunk to proper…

“In summer we lay up a stock of experiences for winter, as the squirrel of nuts, – something for conversation in winter evenings. I love to think then of the more distant walks I took in summer.” Henry David Thoreau Welcome to the last month…

The sound was unmistakable and led me outdoors to face the thick woods across the road. In the advancing twilight the sound pierced the darkness again, and then again. The ghostly mournful wail, best described as a lonely whinny with “tremulous” descending pitch, could only…

Many of us have a deep fascination and connection with trees that seems imprinted within our genetic code. The first hominids to venture on two legs climbed down from trees yet maintained their arboreal residences. The safety of the upper branches and the readily available…

I think it was my twelfth birthday when I received a butterfly and moth capturing kit. It came with a fine-meshed insect net and other items for euthanizing and mounting specimens in a display frame. With my net in hand, I ventured forth to hunt…

“You may go into the fields or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. Your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” From “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” by Beatrix Potter These past two summers…