Unfortunately, passing the Equinox, doesn't flip a switch on the weather. While we may be ready for spring temperatures and mild breezes, this week's winds and cold are a reminder that winter will not "go quietly into that good night." While it may not feel like spring, take solace from the fact that heading back to New Hampshire from the tropics, right now, are some of the most melodious songsters that we have: the woodland thrushes. Turdidae is the Latin classification for the Thrush family,

March 20th marks the Vernal Equinox. It's one of two points on our calendar when day and night are of equal length. More or less. It may be more of a convenient handle we put on an arbitrary point on our annual revolution around the sun, but it is significant in that it marks the point in the year where we start seeing more daylight than darkness. So w ith the days growing longer, this is a great time to talk about photoperiod . Photoperiod is the amount of time in a twenty-four hour period that

Twenty years ago this week, New Hampshire Audubon, the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and NHPR took our first tentative steps on a journey that would take listeners on weekly outdoor adventures all over the state. Something Wild’s very first episode featured host, Rosemary Conroy, then with SPNHF, encouraging us to go outside and look and listen for the early signs of spring. In the intervening decades, we’ve covered a lot of ground; whether it was Rosemary walking through

As the snow starts to melt you might notice a stark contrast in the landscape. Maybe you were driving down the highway and noticed one shoulder was covered with snow while the other side was bare with a faint tinge of spring green shoots. The cause? Slope and aspect. Slope refers to the steepness of the land and aspect refers to the direction the land is facing. Slope and aspect determine how much sunlight a given piece of land receives. The landscape isn't equally endowed and that's most

Chris Schadler is a wild canid biologist, and for about 25 years, her specialty has been the coyote. The first confirmed case of coyotes in New Hampshire was an individual found in a trap in Holderness in the mid 1940s. But they have likely been here longer, because as Schadler points out, they didn’t parachute into Holderness, they will have migrated south from Canada.

Love stories abound this time of year, so what better time to revisit Something Wild’s First Bitten series where we explore the story of what made biologists fall in love with biology? This story is about a boy and a girl, and the great outdoors. Julie Brown loves birds. She loves them so much, she made a living out of them. As the monitoring site coordinator for the Hawk Migration Association of North America , she counts birds, she tracks population and migration trends, she even plans raptor

Fisher populations are down, there’s consensus among wildlife biologists at least about that. But why that is happening is open to debate, as is what to do about it. Something Wild sat down with a couple of wildlife biologists recently who disagree; Meade Cadot , former Executive Director of the Harris Center for Conservation Education, and Patrick Tate, leader of the state’s fur-bearer project for NH Fish and Game. We started with a quick refresher on the biology of the species we’re talking

No one knows better than teachers how quickly a bug, once introduced, can take hold. We’re not just talking about head colds and stomach viruses. Today on Something Wild we’re taking a look at how biologists are first bitten. Not surprisingly, many of the biologists we’ve spoken to over the years were inspired to join the ranks at a young age by a teacher. Susi von Oettingen is an endangered species biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife here in New Hampshire. For her it was her advanced biology

This week we have another edition of New Hampshire’s Wild Neighborhoods, where we take a closer look at one of the more than 200 natural communities you can find within the confines of our state border. Communities like the Alpine Zone or Red oak, Black birch Wooded Talus , but those are pretty rare. Today we’re heading to one of the most ubiquitous ecological landscapes in the world. The Coastal Sand Dune is found in nearly all latitudes from just outside the polar regions to the equator. But

Here at Something Wild, we don’t have a problem with winter. Aside from the snow and the cold and the freezing rain… okay, maybe we have a couple issues. But we have sweaters and hot cocoa and Netflix. Trees, however, do not. As the snow piles up, you may see trees bent over with their crowns nearly touching the ground, leafless and haggard. They can’t escape or hide from the cold, so how do trees survive? Just like any living thing, trees have adapted over time to deal with the range of