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By BILL DANIELSON

Last Saturday was a bit of a milestone for me. It might easily have come and gone without me realizing it, but thanks to my obsessive record keeping I happened to see a notation in the pages of my 2025 field diary and avoided an embarrassing oversight. Last Saturday marked the 28th anniversary of Speaking of Nature, an event that I don’t think I could have ever imagined back in 1997 when I sent in my first column.

By BILL DANIELSON

The great spring migration is in full swing and millions upon millions of birds are flying northward across our entire continent every night. The weather will always play a big role in the exact timing of the movements of the birds, but every morning offers up the opportunity to detect the presence of yet another new arrival. Birds often “surf” on waves of air associated with storms, so the first clear morning after a couple days of rain can be particularly exciting.

By CAROLYN BROWN

Legendary Afrofuturist bandleader, composer, and musician Sun Ra had an eye on the cosmos. Though he passed away in 1993, the members of his 13-person musical ensemble, the Sun Ra Arkestra, have since kept his legacy alive through shows around the world – and one of their next ones will be in the Pioneer Valley. Sun Ra Arkestra will play the Academy of Music on Sunday, May 18, at 8 p.m, in a concert co-presented by the Northampton Jazz Festival and Signature Sounds.

By BILL DANIELSON

Last week I started telling the story of a particular expedition into the woods and I ended up writing a column on the basics of fern biology. I covered the evolution of ferns, their place in the general evolution of terrestrial plants, and the curious nature of their reproductive cycle. To put it plainly, things got away from me and I didn’t notice until it was too late. The beauty of time, however, is the fact that there is always next week. So, without further adieu, I transport you back to a morning in early April…

By BILL DANIELSON

It was a morning in early April and Nature was playing tricks on us. The weather had been cold and raw for days, but then suddenly there was a break from the trend and the temperature soared into the high 60s. There was no threat of rain, but there was a blanket of high clouds shielding us from direct sunlight. It was bright without any shadows – perfect conditions for photography.

By BILL DANIELSON

It was the end of an exciting day of nature photography and as I pulled into my driveway I figured that I was done for the day. I had been out in forests and fields and had managed to take just about 1,000 photographs of flowers, birds and even some turtles. I went into the house, set my camera on the writing desk by my kitchen window and started the process of shifting into “evening mode,” which is what everyone aspires to after a long day. On my way through the house, heading toward a change of clothes and something for dinner, I glanced out the back window and stopped in my tracks. What in Darwin’s name was that?

By BILL DANIELSON

We have reached that time of year when going to work in the morning becomes more difficult with every passing day. The world is waking up from its winter slumber and more and more items of interest present themselves to be observed and adored. I have a rather lengthy commute to work and as the amount of daylight increases each day, so to do the number of distractions. Like Odysseus tempted by the Sirens, I navigate this passage of temptation every day. There are mornings when I feel like my heart will break as I am forced to pilot myself past birds and flowers that sing out to me and beg me to stop and pay attention to them.

By BILL DANIELSON

March Madness is a term that has been assigned to the sport of college basketball. The idea is that a huge tournament creates a frenzied “madness” of athletic exuberance as different teams from across the country compete in a clash of collegiate contenders to see who will be crowned as champion. There are brackets, debates and wagers involved and everyone seems to have a good time.

By BILL DANIELSON

The plan was simple. Make a quick stop at a geologic feature that would provide a real-world example of topics that were being discussed in my biology classes. The topic was evolution and I was specifically looking for an example of rock formations that were being reshaped by the elements. It really couldn’t be any more straightforward, right? Well, perhaps a little background would help.

By TED WATT

It was January, with two feet of cold crisp powder on the ground. The day was bright and sunny. The 5th and 6th grades at our small rural, hill-town school had been studying life sciences. Educators and students were focusing on animals and the many varied ways they are adapted, both physically and behaviorally, to living in their environment. We decided to take advantage of the perfect winter day and headed out to see what we could learn about how animals live in winter from the signs and tracks they left behind.

By BILL DANIELSON

As I write this column I am feeling quite under the weather. The flu has come to town and it has me in its grip. I haven’t left the house in days and all I want to do is sleep. That being said, I am also stuck on “teacher time” and I can’t seem to sleep past 5 a.m. With the recent changing of the clocks this puts me in the unhappy position of being awake while it is still dark outside; annoying on a work day, positively miserable when not going to work.

By BILL DANIELSON

The first week of March came with a roller coaster of emotions. Saturday, March 1 was absolutely amazing. For the first time in months the weather seemed to be warming and there was a moment when I actually considered cleaning off the table on my deck and sitting outside in the sunshine. A large flock of red-winged blackbirds and common grackles arrived that morning and suddenly the yard was full of songs and the murmur of hundreds of birds talking about their plans for the day. It was joyous, it was refreshing, and it was short-lived.

By BILL DANIELSON

Last week I regaled you with a story about a red-tailed hawk. This bird kept showing up in my yard and forlornly staring out across my back yard in the hopes of finding something to eat. At the time, the problem was one of precipitation, or, rather, the precise combination of temperature and precipitation. Snow, followed by rain, followed by prolonged temperatures below freezing had resulted in a landscape that was covered by a thick shell of ice.

By CAROLYN BROWN

The roots music festival Back Porch Festival, which takes place in downtown Northampton, will return for its 11th year from Friday, March 7, through Sunday, March 9, with more than 60 performers.

By BILL DANIELSON

If there has been any theme to this winter it has been the cold. For the first time in years the temperatures have dropped below freezing and generally remained there for weeks on end. Back when I was a kid, my father used to make a skating rink in the back of our house where we would spend endless hours playing hockey. My father even put spotlights in the bedroom windows so that we could play outside at night. On particularly cold nights, my mother would insist that the faces of her children were slathered with copious amounts of Johnson’s baby cream so that we didn’t freeze solid. Those were the days.

By BILL DANIELSON

The kitchen windows face due east. The narrow writing desk is as wide as the double windows and looks out at my deck. Ten feet away is the deck railing and a collection of different feeders. The Birch Perch is there and another five feet away there is a giant lilac bush that fills the yard with perfume in May. But this is wintertime and the only thing the yard is full of now is the hustle and bustle of hungry birds as they bicker with one another over food.

By BILL DANIELSON

Last Friday morning I woke up with a splitting headache and bloody sinuses. Every muscle in my body ached and I was utterly exhausted even after a full night of sleep. I walked out to check on the wood stove, then sat down and contemplated my next move. The threat of inclement weather and my general physical state combined to convince me that going to work was not an option. So I filled out the paperwork for a sick day and then went back to bed.

By BILL DANIELSON

It was a Sunday and a big storm was on the way. The morning was fairly calm, but clouds had moved in and there wasn’t much time before the snow started to fall. In a perfect world I could have simply kicked off my shoes and settled in for a quiet winter morning, but we don’t live in a perfect world. Instead, we live in a world that requires firewood to be moved from time to time, and, like it or not, it was time.

By TOM LITWIN

During migration season this past fall, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, using Nexrad weather radar, tracked approximately 4 billion birds migrating from Canada into the U.S. and 4.7 million birds leaving the U.S. for the tropics. Clearly one strategy for dealing with New England weather is to leave it behind. But other species’ strategies have traded the benefits and perils posed by thousands of miles of travel for the benefits and perils of northern winters.

By BILL DANIELSON

Anyone who has ever dabbled in the art of photography will understand that you find yourself at the mercy of your environment. Of course, I am speaking of outdoor photography in this case. Studio photography is an entirely different organism because in that particular endeavor the art lies in manufacturing an environment. If you are outdoors, however, you have to find ways to make due with what you’ve got on any particular day.

By BILL DANIELSON

Anyone who makes a regular habit of watching birds will recognize that there is a predictable rhythm to the seasons. Winter is the harshest time of year and as a result there are fewer species to look for. At my house, in the month of January, I have managed to see a maximum of 31 different species. Different people living in different places will probably see a smaller number than that, but there may be the occasional yard that has more species to offer.