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It’s 3:30 a.m. on the summit of Stratton Mountain. The sun won’t rise for another two hours, but scientists from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) have already begun their search for “the canary of the mountains,” more commonly known as Bicknell’s Thrush.

While their coffee percolates inside the Ski Patrol hut, VCE field directors Sara Frey and her husband Juan Klavins open mist nets around Stratton’s high-elevation trails to catch the rare bird, which breeds only in the montane fir forests of the U.S. Northeast and parts of the Gaspé Peninsula in Québec.... Read more

John Todd was just a boy, growing up on the north shore of Burlington Bay, Ontario, when his world seemed to collapse around him. Within a few years, his childhood playgrounds of nearby marshes and forestland were transmogrified into subdivisions and a golf course.

“I was a sunny kid, and then I became depressed,” recalls Todd, now 69, who says he was left “psychically rudderless” by the rapid destruction of his once-familiar landscape.... Read more

Like their Hollywood counterparts, some of the biggest stars in the Milky Way galaxy capture our attention long after burning out. Considered in this light, Middlebury College physics professor Frank Winkler is a sort of interplanetary paparazzo — his research focuses on supernovas, or, as he puts it, “stars that blow up in the atmosphere.”

The colorful fragments that result from such explosions, termed “supernova remnants,” can hover several light years away from Earth. But high-tech telescopes furnish scientists like Winkler with detailed views.... Read more