A Vinyl County Almanac

One of my favorite parts of traveling to a new place is exploring how the flora and fauna of that place differ and are similar to what I can find back home. Traveling from the east coast to the west coast, for example, one finds a surprising number of familiar faces, like American robins or dark-eyed juncos, along with local variations on common taxa, like chestnut-sided chickadees and mule deer. Other species, like the American dipper or the bighorn sheep, aren't quite like anything back east. Whether noting a species you've seen a thousand times or adding a new one to your life list, observing plants and animals in an unfamiliar place can spur some really interesting questions about why a species is found in some places and not in others.  Urban areas have a bit of reputation for disappointing roaming naturalists who are hoping to find something new and exciting on their trip. Just as globalization has diluted local food scenes with McDonalds and KFCs, so it has resulted in a...

I overslept this past Tuesday, waking up only a short time before I had to be at work. Luckily, I live close by, so I was still able to get there more or less on time. I was still pretty groggy when I arrived, however, and so it wasn't until one our interns pointed it out that I noticed the strange, orange tint of the sun, and the clouds that were not really clouds, but plumes of smoke wafting across New England from wildfires burning up in Canada.  An orange sun over Lichfield, Connecticut. The orange color of the sun was the result of smoke particles blocking light at shorter wavelengths (yellow, green, and blue) and allowing red and orange light to pass through.  Conditions only got worse as the day went on. When we went out to check on some bat houses, we noticed how the sun's orange tint gave the light in the forest a dawn-like quality, even in mid-morning. Eventually, the smoke became so thick that the sun disappeared altogether and the air smelled like campfires. O...

So, I spent most of last week at work essentially playing a giant game of whack-a-mole with a local black bear that keeps destroying our bluebird boxes and eating all the chicks inside. After searching the literature a bit, we came up with an idea to dissuade the bear by spraying down the boxes with hot pepper wax and grapefruit seed oil (both of which are irritating to bears and not birds), but before we could try out the idea, I had to first rebuild all those boxes. A Carolina wren removing eggshells from his nest in a workshop cubby. While was working in the woodshop, I noticed two Carolina wrens that kept entering the barn through a little hole in the side and hopping around, eying me carefully. This isn't especially strange behavior - Carolina wrens are known for making use of human structures and exploring holes and crevices like little flying mice. They have even been recorded nesting in used boots and old coat pockets and, as such, I started to wonder if this pair perhaps ...