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 naturalist@dwildepress.net. Backyard Naturalist appears the second and fourth Thursdays each month.
Latest columns
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Dana Wilde ponders the changing winter seasons in Maine over the past several decades and his own changing feelings about the seasons.
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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.