This is the time of year when meadows in the Berkshires take on an almost otherworldly beauty. Clover, wild carrot, violets, forget-me-nots –- overnight, drifts of wildflowers have spread across field after field. Banks of blue and white wild phlox glow along roadways and at the edge of the woods. In the deeper shade, columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit, and Indian pipes — complex, curious-looking...
Up close, they look like loosely scattered pearls or bubbles popping in a glass of champagne. Take a few steps back, and they resemble clusters of far-off galaxies, glistening in the dark. I came upon them the other morning on the northwest corner of our frog pond, right where our Field Guide to the Animals of Vernal Pools said that wood frogs prefer to lay their eggs. Look closely at the...
The gouges on our garage door were deep and angry, ripping into the old wood, leaving splinters scattered across the breezeway. Our porch, too, had been attacked, the screens sliced diagonally, the cuts clean as a razor — or a bear claw. A very hungry black bear, it turned out, roused too early from its somnolence by this year’s weirdly warm winter weather. Black bears are a regular feature of...
The sun rises a little higher in the sky every day. With no foliage to shield its glare, it exposes the worst of winter’s detritus: the glint of a beer can on the side of the road, a sudden spread of mold along the base of the porch. If you look carefully, though, you’ll notice a reddening in the underbrush and the witch hazel’s first gaudy yellow tassels fluttering in the breeze. And yesterday...
If I happen to be outside at the end of the day — usually when dusk is beginning to fall — I’ll often hear the gentle, haunting cry of a barred owl: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? It’s unlike any other bird song I know, close to human-sounding in tone and cadence. But also intimate and somehow loving, like a mother calling her children in for dinner. Nearly thirty years ago, the night we...
Except for a light dusting at the beginning of the month, it’s been a snowless December in the Berkshires. Though hardly a dry one. The unusually inclement year is doubling down as it nears its end with rain forecast almost every day this week. The fields are water-logged. The road is mud. Our seasonal creek is overflowing its banks. The ground has yet to freeze for more than a day or two at a...