Bryan's Blog

The Pulse of Ten Thousand Wings

Tens of thousands of Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes can change your life for good. Here’s my next dispatch from Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in south central New Mexico.

Barred Before Bosque

Before I left Vermont for New Mexico, a few Barred Owls came visiting by email. Kerry and Linda Hurd, fittingly, encountered this Barred Owl above while attending the beautiful memorial celebration of Bob Spear’s life at his Birds of Vermont Museum in…

On the Road with Cranes and Geese

My apologies for the scarcity of late here on the blog. Once my work was done on the new web site for the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, I hit the road with Ruth for a month of writing in a cabin somewhere in…

Your New Way to Wildlife

Here’s one more reason to go online before going outside. My pals at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) today launched a new web site that features breaking news about birds, insects, amphibians and other wildlife here in Vermont and…

Fertility and Flight

In the angled light of November, a moth crossed my path through barren woods. Yeah, a moth, in the cold – a lesson in adaptation, fertility, and feminine sacrifice going by the name Bruce Spanworm.

The Last Dragonfly

Even after our first hard frost and our last soft serve, after you’ve raked your leaves and mounted your snow tires, after the warblers have abandoned us for the tropics and you yourself have abandoned notions of warmth, and even after this cold political season – even then a dragonfly of summer remains.

A Halloween Dragon

Nothing scary here – unless you’re a mosquito or some other small flying insect. Halloween Pennants (Celithemis eponina), which hunt and eat insects, range across the eastern US. They perch at the tips of low vegetation and twirl in the…

Vermont’s First Snowy Owl of Autumn

Reed Webster found this Snowy Owl in Westminster, Vermont, on October 25 – our first report of the season. The Arctic has come visiting a bit early this fall. When they do come, Snowys usually begin to arrive here in New England by mid to late…

The Last Monarch

HERE IS YOUR LAST GASP OF SUMMER. Yep, most of the Monarchs are long gone – off with the winds to Mexico. But I’ve encountered America’s favorite butterfly here in Vermont as late as October 31 and along the Maine…

Bob Spear (1920-2014)

CONSIDER EVERYTHING YOU KNOW about the past half-century of birdwatching in Vermont. Long before your field guides and checklists, before bird apps and atlases, before nature centers and eBird, before VINS and VCE, there was Bob Spear. On the long, green path of…

The 2014 Snow Goose Scoop

The snows of autumn begin.

Snow geese are once again moving through Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area in Addison, Vermont. Follow the migration on my new page: THE 2014 SNOW GOOSE SCOOP.

Get the latest reports on goose counts. Read about why snow geese no longer gather in the numbers we enjoyed during the 1980s and 1990s. You’ll also find range maps, articles, and other resources on the biology and ecology of snow geese.

You’ll even find help identifying the rare Ross’s Goose among the honking blizzard of white.

Sunrise Now

Sunrise minutes ago from my office in downtown Montpelier, Vermont.

That’s the Trinity United Methodist Church in the foreground and the First Baptist Church of Montpelier in the background. I was standing near the Unitarian Church.