Wild Side: A hard frost, late
When it comes to weather, every year is unique, perhaps more so on Martha’s Vineyard than in most places. And so far, at least from some perspectives, the spring of 2023 has been an...
Wild Side: Spring orioles
Spring songbird migration on Martha’s Vineyard is a highly variable phenomenon from year to year. Sometimes, about all that happens is that our breeding birds gradually filter in, set up shop, and start nesting....
Wild Side: She’s a polyester bee
How does a female solitary bee start her day? I’d never asked myself the question, but recently ended up with a chance to answer it anyway.
On a long drive back to the Vineyard on...
Wild Side: Bee season is here
My first native bee of the season? Why, thank you for asking! It was a male Bradley’s mining bee, Andrena bradleyi, which I found on April 4 along Lambert’s Cove Road. And it was...
Wild Side: Spring may look sparse
As the first half of April arrives, Vineyarders can finally think of winter in the past tense. To be sure, we could still see snow, and it’ll be the middle of June before we...
Wild Side: It’s an ill wind
Martha’s Vineyard is a great place for birding, with a high diversity of birds present at most times of the year, and a remarkable record for producing outrageous rarities. But nobody has ever accused...
Wild Side: Townsend’s solitaire
So far, 2023 has been a bit of a snoozer from the birdwatching perspective. Not much unusual has been reported, and at least in the areas where I’ve been birding, numbers even of expected...
Wild Side: On the house fly
“House fly.” I think we all get roughly the same image from that common name: a grayish fly, between a quarter- and a half-inch long, its wings spread as it perches, with an annoying...
Wild Side: The hermit thrush
One of the more gratifying aspects of birding is the way even familiar species find ways to surprise you. Common birds turn up in new settings at new times, or do things you’ve never...
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 woes, it’s nice to be able to write occasionally about...
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 count in recent memory: Once some morning fog burned off,...
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 the family occurs in North America, it has a pretty...
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 also give some thought to ones that I didn’t see:...
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 invertebrates. And even without a frost, many insects have simply...
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 mailbox post 200 yards up the road. As a young...
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 evolved by others, are endlessly fascinating in the variation of...
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 October brought some serious rain to the Vineyard, mitigating the...
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 turn up inside our house get reintroduced to the great...
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 20 species and forms are known from the Vineyard —...
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 toured a likely site for the fieldwork portion of that...