Matt Pelikan
Wild Side: Red-bellied (Carolina) woodpecker
In these days when so many bird species are beleaguered by habitat loss, climate change, disease, environmental toxins, competition from invasive species, or other...
Wild Side: CBC
The 63rd annual Martha’s Vineyard Christmas Bird Count (CBC), held on the first day of the year, was in one respect the most enjoyable...
Wild Side: New World warblers
The New World warblers — that’s the avian family Parulidae — features many of the most popular and attractive songbirds in the world. As...
Wild Side: Where are the butterflies hiding?
As calendar years approach their ends, I always find myself reflecting back on what interesting species I found in the preceding months. But I...
Wild Side: Insects are still out there
As November winds down, bugwatching likewise grows slow. All of the Island, by this point, has had at least one hard frost, killing many...
Wild Side: Aging naturalist
As a kid, I had astonishing vision. I can remember standing in our driveway and seeing with perfect clarity a wrought-iron filigree on a...
Wild Side: Weird wasps
As you will have gathered by now, there isn’t much about insects that doesn’t interest me. These animals, primitive by some measures but highly...
Wild Side: Survival of the fittest
I write this column under the optimistic assumption that the Drought of 2022 is in the rear-view mirror. September and the first half of...
Wild Side: Sometimes no-kill insect studies don’t work
A lifelong lover of wildlife of all kinds, I avoid killing anything. I brake for turkeys and squirrels; spiders, and stinkbugs, and crickets that...
Wild Side: Andrena nubecula
Yellow is the signature color of Martha’s Vineyard in late September: goldenrod is blooming everywhere! These members of the aster family — somewhere around...
Wild Side: The cicada that sang in the morning
On Thursday, August 25, I met with high school science teacher Anna Cotton to discuss a natural history classroom project she’s developing. We briefly...
Wild Side: Eastern tiger swallowtail
This has, by and large, been a pitiful season for butterflies. As I wrote in my July 12 column, I believe butterfly numbers in...
Wild Side: Leafcutter bees
With more than 180 species in nearly 30 genera, the bee fauna of Martha’s Vineyard presents an amazing diversity of appearance, life history, and...
Wild Side: The Carolina grasshopper
The Carolina grasshopper, Dissosteira carolina, ranks among the most common species of Orthoptera on Martha’s Vineyard, and also among the most easily found and...
Wild Side: Where are the butterflies?
Among the most common wildlife questions that I get these days runs about like this: “I’m hardly seeing any butterflies. Are their numbers down?”
It’s...
Wild Side: Our Vineyard bioblitz
For centuries at least, there has existed a tradition of amateur study of nature. During the 20th century, observing nature achieved real popularity as...
Wild Side: The Breeding Bird Survey
For about 20 years now, I’ve spent one morning every June running the Vineyard’s Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) route. Coordinated by the U.S. Geological...
Wild Side: Hitchhiking grasshoppers
My friend Margaret Curtin is a top-shelf naturalist. I closely follow her posts to the “citizen science” platform iNaturalist.org, where she helps me and...
Wild Side: Face to face with bees
You probably think about bees from time to time. Their role as pollinators has come increasingly into the public eye in recent years, while...
Wild Side: One for the books
There is some really weird stuff out there.
Take the insect order Strepsiptera, commonly known as “twisted-wing insects” because of the bizarre wing form shown...