Something Wild recently visited Maria Colby, director of Wings of the Dawn Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Henniker.

There’s no way around it. This week, Something Wild is a little thick. Like hundreds of pages thick but stay with us. The state’s Wildlife Action Plan is a monumental document about New Hampshire’s flora and fauna. Amanda Stone with UNH Cooperative Extension, summed it up pretty well recently on NHPR’s The Exchange . “It’s an incredible valuable body of info about wildlife and habitat that we have for communities, land owners and conservation groups to use in their conservation planning when

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

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.

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

Bobcats have been all over the news lately. It's kind of amazing to think that 30 years ago wildlife biologists estimated there were only 150 bobcats in New Hampshire. That's not the case anymore - their numbers are now estimated to be around 1400! How did these cats make such an impressive recovery? For about 200 years it was open season on bobcats, and up until 1973 they had bounties on their heads. Hunting and trapping was closed altogether in 1989. The bobcats weren't alone; there were also

So the thing about “nature shows” - even this one - is that we tend to talk about plant and animal species in pretty independent terms. "The red-tailed hawk eats this, sounds like that, does this in the winter…" But as we’ve tried to explain over the years (here at Something Wild) the hawk is just one resident in complex ecological puzzle; she interacts with other animals and plants in the neighborhood. In this installment of NH’s Wild Neighborhoods we're going to take a look at another of NH's

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

New Hampshire’s Pack Monadnock is one of the best places in the state for hawk watch. Most of the migrating raptors in northern New England and northeastern Canada follow the trail of thermal updrafts that take them over this peak. Last fall, more than 13,000 raptors were counted from the hawk watch station at Pack Monadnock, and more than 10,000 of them were broad-winged hawks. And this year, Eric Masterson decided he would follow them on their journey south, on a bicycle. Eric is a biologist

Water is what has allowed life to generate and regenerate on this tiny blue marble of ours. Most of us would shrivel up and blow away without a water supply. And yet every year at this time water becomes scarce, surface water anyway. So the question is what happens when that water freezes. Consider for a moment how profound it is when you wake up that morning in December and the temperature is below freezing. It’s a bit of a touchstone, because, barring a a thaw, you know the temperature’s not