The season of dazzling hillsides ablaze with vivid, colorful, autumnal foliage is all but over. There may be three more weeks before the winter solstice, but already most of our trees are showing their bare, skeletal branches, foretelling the approaching season of cold. At this…

Thanksgiving ushers in a season of celebration. We set aside our hectic lives to gather with family and friends to break bread, give thanks and enjoy cherished traditions. Roasted turkey with all the trimmings has usually been our mid-day meal, and when I was growing…

Some of our region’s mammals and birds either hibernate or migrate to survive the cold winter season of limited food resources. Snug in dens they snooze through the cold weeks and months or fly thousands of miles to tropical regions full of insects and blooming…

“This dropping into a sleep that seems so close to death is one of the strangest adventures of the animal world. The flame of life, for months on end, sinks so low it almost–but not quite–goes out” — Edwin Way Teale, from “Autumn Across America,” Chapter…

The wet months of July and August may have put a damper on summer vacation plans, but it sure did wonders for the number of wild mushrooms found in the woods. I am the first to admit I have very little knowledge about mushrooms, wild…

There are several folktales when it comes to forecasting the severity of winter weather, and one I have heard quite a bit this fall is, this winter will be severe because oak trees are producing so many acorns. Recent hikes in our woods have been…