The only independent, nonprofit news organization solely dedicated to reporting on the Adirondack Park.
ALTHOUGH I’VE READ several books about loons, a couple of them gloriously illustrated, Journey with the Loon strikes me as the most scientifically informed and appropriately illustrated study of loons I’ve ever experienced. David C. Evers is the executive director, founder, and chief scientist of the Biodiversity Research Institute and has been studying loons since 1987; his wife, Kate M. Taylor, has worked…
MY FIRST MEETING with the nature writer Bernd Heinrich came on a dark, stormy night at the Saranac Lake Free Library. He was reading from a book then in progress, The Snoring Bird, which combines a biography of the author’s entomologist father with Bernd Heinrich’s own life story. Anyone who had the privilege of being…
SEEING WILD ANIMALS has never been easier. All you have to do these days is flop onto a couch, hit a button, and the glittering pixels of a digital television bring you images of almost any creature you like. You see it eating, sleeping, birthing, mating, dying, the works. Still, let’s get real. Ogling virtual…
Amateur astronomers promote the region’s dark skies by creating the Adirondack Public Observatory. By Kim Martineau FRAMED BY mountains and free of sprawl, Tupper Lake has always been a good place for gazing at the stars. Now the heavens just got closer. The Adirondacks’ first public observatory is set to formally open in July in…
Nature rare and common HOW IS THE INTREPID Adirondack explorer to make sense of all the flora, fauna, and fungi out there? In the past, the typical way was to carry field guides, which, in the grand tradition of nature books, tended to tackle one subject at a time. A generalist wanting greater knowledge of…
A must for moss mavens Field guides don’t get much more specific than the beautiful new Common Mosses of the Northeast and Appalachians, the latest in the excellent series of field guides published by Princeton University Press. The identification of mosses, aside from distinguishing a few easily recognized common species, has long been the exclusive…
By Phil Brown
State officials felt they had no choice but to kill an injured moose that had been hanging out in the Ausable River in Wilmington Notch, according to David Winchell, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Conservation. “The primary factor was its deteriorating condition,” Winchell said this morning. “It was not able to move out…
By Phil Brown
As I often do, I climbed Baker Mountain on my lunch hour today and was surprised by the amount of leaves that already have come down. As you can see from the photo above, the trail was covered in places. It struck me as a little early to see so many leaves on the ground.…
By Phil Brown
Conservation leaders from the Garden Club of America will be meeting in the Adirondacks over the next week and discussing a variety of issues with environmentalists, scientists, local farmers, and others. Nancy Howard, a former owner of the Wawbeek on Upper Saranac Lake, arranged the annual field trip and lined up an impressive array of…
By Phil Brown
We all need to learn more about the ecological risks posed by invasive species. There is no better time than next week, when the Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program will be coordinating a series of activities to raise awareness of the problem. Following is a news release from the organization. Groups across the region are…