Where the Arctic Slips South

The road was little more than a narrow strip of gravel cut through an impossibly flat, glacial landscape. Snow covered everything: fields, ditches, fence lines until the horizon dissolved into blowing white. It was the last hour of daylight, that blue-gray window when contrast disappears and depth becomes hard to judge. Drifts of snow slid […]

Nature Tip: Keep Your Eyes on the Sky for Visible Migration

Most birds migrate at night to take advantage of calmer skies, cooler temperatures, and fewer predators. As a result, much of bird migration occurs without our ability to observe it directly. Luckily for us, some birds migrate during the day. Diurnal migrants include hawks and other soaring birds that ride thermals (rising warm air), swallows […]

The Wild Idea That Began in Yellowstone

The first thing Carly Crow remembers is the cold. She was thirteen years old, far from her home in southern Georgia, sleeping in a tent beneath the vast Wyoming sky. The trip was part of a Girl Scouts adventure called Wyoming Wildlife Wonders, a journey that included time in two of the country’s most iconic […]

The Boardwalk

For a few weeks each May, the southern shore of Lake Erie becomes one of the best places in North America to stand still. At the Magee Marsh boardwalk in northern Ohio, warblers move through at eye level, sometimes so close it feels absurd. A male Chestnut-sided Warbler picks through leaves an arm’s length away, […]