Aside from humans, perhaps no other species can modify its surroundings for its own purposes as much as beaver.
Throughout much of North America, these busy critters take down trees and dam streams to create waterways safe from predators and to lay up enough woody food stores to last the winter.
This exuberant activity is why beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or species that profoundly change their environment in out-sized proportion to their numbers. [Read more…] about How Beavers Modify Forests: New Understandings
We were touring the neighborhood backroads one summer evening when the kids noticed a sleek movement through a small pond.
North American porcupines are large rodents whose ancestors apparently crossed from Africa to South America on floating trees and logs some 30 million years ago. Their most prominent feature are the approximately 30,000 quills which grow individually everywhere out of the skin musculature, interspersed with bristles, under fur and hair.
As the sunset colors fade from purple to black an eerie sound breaks the forest calm. It is not the long, low, slow howling of wolves that can be heard further north, but the group yip-howl of coyotes: short howls that often rise and fall in pitch, punctuated with staccato yips, yaps, and barks. 
The opposum is the only marsupial living in North America, and they’re one of the oddest-looking, slowest moving mammals around.
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has reminded New Yorkers to appreciate wildlife from a safe distance and resist the urge to touch or pick up newborn fawns and other young wildlife.
Around the time spring flowers are blooming and migrating songbirds are arriving, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation starts receiving calls concerning fox sightings in and around rural and suburban areas.
Some people have life birds, species of birds they’ve waited their whole lives to see in the wild. I don’t have one of these, but I do have a life mole. I’ve been waiting to catch a glimpse of Condylura cristata, the star-nosed mole, ever since I learned about this animal during a small mammals course in graduate school.
As the buds on hardwood trees and shrubs open and New York State’s forests again are cloaked in green, they provide our many herbivores with a welcome change in their diet.
As spring arrives, so do… bats? Like many other naturalists, I spend lots of time during this season looking for migrating salamanders and blossoming bloodroot.