I have for many decades been fascinated by beech trees and beech stands — from the mature, elephant-skinned sentries standing tall and broad, to their understory infants immediately below, to the empty, thorny husks and the small, three-sided nuts they contain for posterity — all interesting and, when you probe the depths, perplexing in many […]

Maybe that deer I wrote about last week — relying on eyewitness Tom Ricardi’s report of watching it run for its life from a large bobcat toward the South River just upstream from Conway’s Burkeville Covered Bridge – didn’t escape after all. Ricardi opined that had he not pulled his vehicle over to observe the […]

It’s noontime Tuesday, gray and wet, home snow-removal chores in the rearview, televised Patriots parade underway in Boston. I’m walking the dogs in steady rain that’s softening the shallow coating of fresh, white, sticky snow. The precipitation had changed from snow to sleet to rain as I whisked clean the snow-blower blades and carriage after […]

Whenever I write about local wildcats, it seems that the feedback locomotive gets rolling full-steam ahead. So it was no surprise that last week’s column drew a spike in reader email. Oh my! Can you imagine what’ll happen when I finally jump into that Petersham mountain-lion-attacks-horse tale, which I was aware of months before it […]

A noontime phone call from a neighbor, a brief conversation, a spin around the Internet and — Bingo! — another column in the making. It all unfolded quite by chance on Tuesday, after finishing a couple of morning tasks: first, a trip to Agway to buy dog and cat food and cedar shavings on senior-discount […]