I’ve always toyed with the idea of someday hiking the entire 2,185-mile Appalachian Trail (A.T.) as a thru-hike, but life, a job and various other responsibilities have accumulated such that taking off for the required ~6 months to complete the trek no longer seemed feasible. However, it occurred to me this year that I could still hike the A.T. – I just needed to do it in pieces, referred to as section-hiking. Given that I live on Cape Cod, the…
Painted turtles are one of the most widespread turtles in the North America, and are fairly common throughout Massachusetts. They prefer shallow bodies of water that offer places to haul out and bask in the sun, such as exposed rocks or fallen, partially submerged logs. They have a rather smooth shell, with red patterns along the outer edge, a yellow spot (sometimes elongated) behind their eye, and yellow stripes on their head and neck. There is a useful identification sheet…
I bet you’re thinking, “Newt? It just looks like a salamander.” Physically, newts lack the side grooves typically found along most salamanders’ bodies. Taxonomically, all salamanders are in the family Salamandridae, while newts fall within a subfamily to that: Pleurodelinae. In other words, all newts are salamanders, but not all salamanders are newts. The red-spotted newt (Notophthalmus v. viridescens) is one of four sub-species of the eastern newt (Notophthalmus viridescens), and is the only sub-species found in New England. During…
Saturday, on a near 50-degree sunny morning, I joined a guided walk led by MassAudubon to explore the vernal pools at Ashumet Holly in Falmouth. A vernal pool is a unique temporary wetland that fills with water in the autumn or winter due to rainfall, snow melt and rising groundwater and remains ponded through the spring and sometimes into early summer. What makes vernal pools different from an ordinary pond is that vernal pools dry completely by the middle or…
Barataria Preserve south of New Orleans, part of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, is one of the park’s 6 locations and contains more than 23,000 acres of swamp, marsh and waterways. I had expected to see a myriad of birds while there, but the true diversity in my wildlife sightings turned out to be in the herpetofauna. A few days prior to my visit, Louisiana had experienced unseasonably cold weather with temperatures in the 30s. The bright…