As long as I’m insulting pet owners, let’s take a well-deserved swipe at people who buy exotic reptiles, because they are bad people, too.
Folks, if you need interesting possessions to make yourself seem interesting, find something less destructive to own than non-native reptiles.
Buying and selling them is destructive in two ways: The species get harmed [...]

My column in the Telegraph today starts out deliberately provocatively:

As a cat owner, I am comfortable making the following statement: If you let your cat outdoors, you are a bad person.

Oh, yes, you are. No matter what excuses you hide behind, you have chosen to release a wildlife-slaughtering machine on the great outdoors: You might [...]

It is officially almost spring: I turned on the electric fence around the beehive yesterday. Bears are hungry when they wake up up after hibernating, you know. NH Fish & Game knows it: They’re telling people to take down their bird feeders, lest they lure a wayward bruin.
But as YouTube demonstrates, an electric fence will [...]

This isn’t really geeky, but since tomorrow is Town Meeting day in NH and many people will be voting on road-paving projects, I can’t resist: This is the blog of a guy in Britain who fills in potholes with dirt and plants flowers in them. “If we planted one of those in every hole, it [...]

It sounds odd at first that the population of lobsters is estimated by the number of them that are caught each year. It might seem that catching more means fewer are left in the wild, but it’s the opposite: when more are caught it means that there are more in the wild.
This is possible because [...]

Researchers searching the ocean floor in the Gulf of Maine found plenty of hardened cysts deposited by algae last fall that can seed the blooms known as “red tide,” leading them to predict that this summer could be a bad season for the toxic algae. Its biggest effect is to shut down shellfish collecting, because [...]

As I’ve noted before (in this Nov. 30 post), genetic analysis indicates that as coyotes have migrated back to the East Coast over the past few decades, they have interbred with eastern wolves. The Boston Globe has a story about this today, nicely summarizing the work:
In a paper published this month in the journal Biology [...]

One of the most visible signs (visible to us landlubbers, anyway) of stresses in the ocean ecology is “fishing down the food chain” - the way that commercial fishing operations, having helped destroy stocks of desirable species like cod, take aim at species that they once ignored.
The Portland Press-Herald, which like a good newspaper in [...]

The official age of “Herbie” - the American elm in Maine that was officially the tallest of its species in New England until it finally succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease - is 217, reports the Press-Herald. From the story:
The 110-foot tree survived 14 bouts of Dutch elm disease thanks to its caretaker, Frank Knight, who’s [...]

The most recent issue of Wildlife Journal, a glossy magazine put out by the New Hampshire Fish & Game, has an article talking about ticks and moose. Written by a masters candidate in wildlife ecology at UNH named Dan Bergeron, it talks about research into the effects of ticks on moose and contains some eye-popping [...]

Wild turkeys have become commonplace in the past decade or so, as the population continues to expand following its mid-1970s re-introduction into NH. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department is asking for an online “citizen science” survey to determine numbers, reporting sightings of turkey flocks seen through March 31, by filling out an online survey here: http://www.wildnh.com/turkeysurvey.

A survey by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation says that a staggering nine-tenths of the cave-dwelling bats in studied caves have been killed by white nose fungus in three years. (Story here, from Burlington Free-Press.) The study included 18 caves in eastern New York, four in western Massachusetts and one in Vermont.
I certainly [...]

I try to avoid writing “there are lots of so-and-so bugs around this year” stories, because with a lack of data (nobody does a running bug count) it’s hard to turn a few anecdotes into anything concrete. My favorite example: Last year I was asked by one person to write a story about how there [...]

A study headed out of New York State Museum analyzed the genetic history of 686 coyotes in the Northeast and concluded that most are coyote-wolf hybrids. Here’s the press release. Some highlights:
This new study of eastern coyote genetics and skull morphology shows that remnant wolf populations in Canada hybridized with coyotes expanding north of the [...]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, fearing that the emerald ash borer will be unstoppable, has started a volunteer National Ash Tree Seed Collection Initiative, for people to collect ash-tree seeds that can be stored at the National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colo. From the Web site: “The U.S. Forest Service has agreed to x-ray the collected ash seed to determine sound seed for storage. If the ash tree populations are completely decimated by the ash borer, the stored seeds can be used as the genetic base for work to re-establish ash trees for future generations.”

The program doesn’t seem to have started in Northern New England yet, but it’s in New York state. Details are here.

Part of me thinks this is brilliant foresight, and part of me is depressed as hell that it’s even necessary.