The Nature of Phenology | WERU 89.9 FM Blue Hill, Maine Local News and Public Affairs Archives

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Here in Maine where we are just out of reach of most hurricanes and tornadoes, generally too wet for frequent natural forest fires, and often times not wet enough for massive flooding events, we instead look to the winter to breathe life into forest communities in the form of cryogenic disturbance, or freezing. Photos, a full transcript, ref...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Every creature has its own survival strategy, but perhaps one of the more peculiar is that of eastern painted turtles who right now are sitting partially buried in mud at the bottom of countless ponds and backwaters. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About the...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark If blue jays annoy you, discover at least three nice things about them. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About the host/writers: Joe Horn lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder of Maine Outdoor School, L3C, and is a Registered Maine Guide and Carpenter. He is pas...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark A blanket of snow on the ground provides many of the same benefits as that blanket on your bed. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About the host/writers: Joe Horn lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder of Maine Outdoor School, L3C, and is a Registered Maine Guide...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark The spruces, bears, moose, and mosquitoes know nothing of our human calendar yet they find their annual cadence. Regardless of your New Year celebration, we can all overlay natural happenings on our own human calendar and be in touch with the heartbeat and rhythm of our season. So let’s go through a Maine calendar year from the perspective o...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Bringing evergreens indoors this time of year, in whole or in part, is a tradition that not only pre-dates Christianity, but also has existed in many cultures around the world for centuries, if not millennia, on the winter solstice. Why be an evergreen? Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatu...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark I regularly hear people refer to any evergreen as a pine, which saddens me a bit for all the joy that can come of knowing the individual trees in our woods. Learn how to identify our quintessential holiday tree, the balsam fir, compared to its pine family relatives. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more availab...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark While you might feel most at home sitting on a bucket on a frozen lake pulling togue bare-handed through a hole in the ice, your ancestors evolved basking in the hot sun and stifling humidity of tropical Africa. As we slide ever closer to winter, how do we not freeze to death? Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and m...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark House mice aren’t just thieves and squatters, they are frontiersmen, farmers, sailors, and traders of old and have found a way to travel to and live everywhere in the world—a feat that few species can claim. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About the host/wri...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark When I say first snowfall, I’m not talking about the first time we get a quick, fluttering flurry of snowflakes or a gray day with the occasional snowflake lazily descending towards the green grass. No, I am talking about the get-out-the-ruler, stoke-up-the-woodstove, pull-out-the-sled, first snow of the year. But how does that snow form? Ph...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Mountain ash, which is not really an ash tree nor does it exclusively grow on mountains, offers late-season berries for hungry wildlife. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About the host/writers: Joe Horn lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder of Maine Outdoor Scho...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark The pink earth lichen stands out as it is rare to find something that shade of pink in nature. You might confuse it for tiny pink mushrooms, but a little knowledge of lichen anatomy clarifies what those pink blobs are. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com About t...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark In celebration of today’s 200th unique episode, let’s look into a group of Maine organisms that encompasses 200 species: the mollusks. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder and Naturalist Educator at Maine Outdoor Sch...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Sometimes called yellow brain or trembler, this jelly fungus most often called witch’s butter is springy but not sticky to the touch, though it can feel somewhat slimy when wet. Its Latin name literally means “trembling middle intestine.” Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.w...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Young oaks and beeches, but especially beech trees, tend to retain their dead leaves through the fall and often straight through the winter only to shed them once spring has sprung. This tendency is called “marcescence.” Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Calling these magnificent fish “lake trout” is a bit of a misnomer. While these fish are most at home in deep, cold, freshwater lakes and ponds, they are not trout. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder and Naturalist...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark There are several species of cotton-grass in Maine, but you know you’re looking at one if you see what looks like an unkempt cotton ball at the end of a stem that can be up to three feet tall. Standing taller than most of their low-growing bog neighbors, its top-heavy form bobs and sways in the breeze looking like something out of The Lorax....

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark While we do have year-round populations of juncos in Maine, they are joined by even more juncos who spent the summer breeding season in Canada or the Arctic Circle during the fall. So juncos locally are now forming large flocks of up to twenty-five birds, sometimes including other sparrow species, for the winter. Photos, a full transcript, r...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Any New Englander worth their beans knows that coastal communities get long luxurious autumns and get less snow come winter, but why? This is all thanks to the strange properties of water and how it interacts with the atmosphere compared to land. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphe...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Frost forms when surface temperatures of objects dip below both the freezing and the dew points, causing instantaneous fuzzy ice to form on the surface of objects like our lovely garden plants. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro,...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark A bright red ruby, about a half inch across, studded with rhinestones …or a shamrock orbweaver spider? Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder and Naturalist Educator at Maine Outdoor School, L3C, and is a Registered Ma...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Seaside goldenrod is closely related to the other goldenrods you are likely more familiar with as they are in the same genus, Solidago, which comes from the Latin meaning “to make whole” due to its healing properties. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel St...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark Grasshoppers seem cute and unintimidating until the variables that cause a locust swarm occur. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Founder and Naturalist Educator at Maine Outdoor School, L3C, and is a Registered Maine Guid...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark While many species of puffball are only the size of a marble or golf ball, the giant puffball certainly lives up to its name as a mature specimen can be as big as a large watermelon. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com Hazel Stark lives in Gouldsboro, is Co-Foun...

Producers: Hazel Stark & Joe Horn Host: Hazel Stark You can’t mistake these damselflies for anything else: the males have enchanting black wings while the females have dark charcoal-bronze wings, appearing black from afar, with a single white dot on each of the four wingtips. Photos, a full transcript, references, contact information, and more available at thenatureofphenology.wordpress.com H...