Dana Wilde lives in Troy. His writings on Maine’s natural world are collected in “The Other End of the Driveway,” available from online booksellers or by contacting the author at [email protected]. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
Latest columns
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Spiders tend to get even bigger and more detailed in stories of their sightings and turn humongous when those stories get woven in with the other tales, Dana Wilde writes.
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Fall is getting pleasantly, alarmingly warmer, writes Dana Wilde, with the cause hardly a mystery.
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Watching a 4-year-old navigate nature, writes Dana Wilde, highlights the self reliance of Thoreau and Emerson.
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There are more weird-looking creatures on the green Earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy, writes Dana Wilde.
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Even though they look monstrous, spiders are actually your allies in the battle against the little bugs who do try to eat you, writes Dana Wilde.
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You could spend a lifetime sorting out information on one star at a time and probably not make your way through them all, writes Dana Wilde.
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Nature has an array of exceptions to every named category, writes Dana Wilde, whether plants or processes or people.
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If I don’t make it hard for the mosquitoes, writes Dana Wilde, they will innocently do their best to kill me.
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Temperatures in the last 10 years are markedly higher than any time in recorded history, writes Dana Wilde.
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In the ancient experience, the stars were forces, detectable through fear, that we are obliged to pay respect to, writes Dana Wilde.
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By now it’s more or less accepted medical wisdom that pets provide emotional nourishment for humans, writes Dana Wilde.
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A species of "true bugs" invading our homes started in recent decades, writes Dana Wilde, as they moved eastward amid milder winters.
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What would happen, Dana Wilde asks, if you plunked spiders into a weird environment — like outer space?
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We like to think we’ve come a long way in conservation. Which we have, sort of, writes Dana Wilde, but the Earth is right now undergoing its sixth mass extinction event.
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It's hard to remember what life was like before syntactic devices, but it existed, writes Dana Wilde.
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Winter is changing, and so are Mainers as we come to grips with that reality, Dana Wilde writes.
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If the atmosphere continues to heat up, it may not be snowing much in the Northeast in the next century, Dana Wilde writes.
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This month is an astonishing revelation if you know where to look, as angles of light point us toward cosmic truth, Dana Wilde writes.
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While the world closes down in November, beauty knells up through the tamarack branches on the edge of bogs and winter, writes Dana Wilde.
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In October comes a certain slant of light that seems to rise up out of some unseen spot of time and gather itself, and head south, writes Dana Wilde.
