Mass Audubon Blogs

Scott Edwards is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Mass Audubon Council Member. On June 6, 2020, Scott left his home in Concord, Massachusetts, to set off on a cross-country bike trip. He spoke to Mass Audubon’s Hillary Truslow from a […]

“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” William Shakespeare, King John Act 4, Scene 2 The quote above seems fitting for this week’s featured creature: the lovely Painted Lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui). As if the vibrant flowers they grace in search of nectar were not gorgeous enough, Painted Ladies seem to adorn them even further with a near-excessive beauty. Found on […]

Clean air. Safe drinking water. Social connection. Climate protection.  What do these things have in common? They’re all benefits provided by forests.  Forests purify our air and water, and capture carbon from the atmosphere, helping to reduce the impacts of climate change (see our fact sheet on forest ecosystem services for more benefits). These services aren’t just good for the planet – they are vital to our […]

Barn Swallows nesting at the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge have had a successful season in 2020 in the Fort River Boat House. The full final report is available here. Season Summary We estimate that 30 – 38 pairs of Barn Swallows nested in the Fort River Boat House in 2020. Of […]

Land stewardship coordinator, Bea Oliva, joined the MetroWest team at Broadmoor. She is a Terra Corps service member who will coordinate volunteers making trail reroutes and improvements, providing training workshops and mentoring to conservation land managers, and working with local communities on land stewardship projects. She will serve full time for the next eleven months […]

This phone camera is as beat as these plants. If you can make it out through the impressionistic haze, that’s our frozen tomato patch on the left and two burned-up bean beds on the right. We noticed the first frost damage of the year on husk cherries and purslane weeds on the morning of 9/15, […]

With numerous reports of lion’s mane and other species of jellyfish in our waters this summer, we were pretty certain endangered leatherback sea turtles would soon follow. Leatherbacks, the world’s largest sea turtle, feed almost exclusively on jellies. And by late summer some of that feeding was occurring in Vineyard Sound, one of the most […]

At 7:30 AM this past Wednesday, our group of birders gathered in the Hellcat parking lot in dense fog with Dave Weaver co-leading with me. We were joined by David O’Neill, Mass Audubon’s new president! He was giddy that he was able to escape the confinement of his temporary residence, off of Zoom meetings, and […]

Blue vervain  (Verbena hastata) On walks last week I observed two of my favorite flowers, both having blue flowers. Though fairly common in this area, they are less showy and can easily be overlooked among grasses and taller plants that dominate in late summer. Blue vervain commonly occurs in wet meadows, wet river bottomlands, and stream […]

Julia is a teacher-naturalist at Moose Hill who has been with Mass Audubon for over four and a half years and at Moose Hill specifically for the last year and a half. Julia is passionate about conservation and protecting the environment so future generations have the same resources that we have today and she loves […]