So, this partnership among NHPR, New Hampshire Audubon and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests is one in which bird and tree knowledge is well represented. But much of the state’s wildlife, as you’ve no doubt noticed, can be classified as “other.” Today we tackle some of that other, in the form of the garter snake with Mike Marchand, Wildlife Biologist with NH Fish and Game. There are about a dozen different species of snake in the granite state, but chances are if you’ve

New Hampshire is experiencing one of those few rare and special weeks right now. About 48 weeks of the year, the New Hampshire landscape is pretty homogenous; from a distance our deciduous trees can all look the same: either a blanket of green leaves, or nothing but sticks. But during a few brief weeks in the fall and in the spring – trees show their true colors. New Englanders take pride in our brilliant fall foliage season, but our ephemeral spring foliage season often passes without nearly as

We tagged along with Diane DeLuca, a biologist with NH Audubon on her rounds of the Deering Wildlife Sanctuary. DeLuca has been working on their Phenological Monitoring Pilot Project , and defines phenology as " the study of ' phenophases' , which are the different phases that plants and animals go through in their life cycle each year." She's plotted points all over a map of the reserve, to examine the development of several species of plants and animals during this very busy time of year. The

The North American Wood Frog has developed an impressive strategy for surviving cold New England winters. It doesn't seek warmth as other animals do. The wood frog goes with the cold and actually freeze in the winter months. Come spring, it thaws out, ready for mating season. How does it do that? We don't really know. While we don't know exactly how it all works (yet) we can see what's going on inside the frog. It all starts at the first sign of ice. When the frog touches an ice crystal its body

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

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.