The upland bird hunting season opened Saturday and shotgun reports could be heard throughout the valley on a bright, crisp, colorful autumn day. For what it’s worth, personal observation points to a down year for ruffed grouse. That early assessment is subject to change as the young season progresses, but after brief fruitless visits to […]

State Deer Project Leader Bill Woytek had an interesting take on the rabid bobcat that went on a rampage through the Greenfield Meadows last month on a sultry Saturday afternoon before being killed by law-enforcement officials. “I guess it has something to say about the many mountain lion sightings reported over the years,” he said. […]

A soft cool breeze tickled my right eardrum, caressed the tip of my nose and carried my scent in a northeasterly direction, toward the small stream exiting a massive beaver pond a hundred or more yards north. The clock was the sunset shadow creeping up the eastern ridge before me. I knew that once the […]

My mind started wandering on a fog-drenched Wednesday morning as my truck meandered home through the Greenfield Meadows, and for some reason it brought me back to my old footloose days, when I’d head for a hilltown stream on similar damp, grey days. Back then, there was always a round, galvanized, two-handled washtub full of […]

The crescent moon cast a vertical smile over the southwest corner of a little hayfield where a doe and her fawn had been showing up often on summer eves. I had seen them many times in my nightly travels, consistently entering the field around dusk, behind the cover of a razor-thin hardwood stand some 30 […]

A neighbor and I were on our way to Halifax, Vt., Saturday morning when, coming around the corner to a small East Colrain produce farm, we were confronted by an unexpected catastrophe. Farmer and friends were standing on the driveway below his hillside home, marooned from West Leyden Road by a muddy torrent as wide as […]

There was nothing unusual at the start of our telephone conversation last week, me at my Recorder desk, he his New Salem home, after dark. Pretty typical for my rambling chats over the years with Peter Mallett, brainchild/promoter in chief of the Miller River Fishermen’s Association. An affable sort, he’s always been upbeat and enthusiastic […]

Yes, the brook’s roaring, the songbirds’re singing, the snowbanks’re shrinking, and my last load of cordwood’s drying ever so slowly, stacked under the eaves of the sunny carriage sheds. No, it isn’t time for stream-fishing here in the northern tier of Franklin County. Too much snow, way too much, in fact; even worse, annoying mud […]

They’re raising a ruckus in the sleepy Hampshire County hilltown of Chesterfield, where officials are threatening to shut down a longtime camp on a Boy Scout reservation in a dispute over a temporary summer shooting range. Although I don’t intend to research and devote a lot of time to the case — surely, much to […]