Taking a walk at night with a UV flashlight is just as good as going to a haunted house. In this week’s episode of Natural Connections, Naturalist Emily Stone discovers spooky fungi, including edible abortive entoloma mushrooms, blood-red moss, and a gracefully creepy millipede. Get inspired to go out on your own dark forest night hike!

Natural Connections

189 - A Spooky Walk with Many Legs

Fall is a beautiful time to be in the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota. Naturalist Emily Stone recently went on a canoe trip there and witnessed a merlin chasing songbirds, as well as autumn meadowhawk dragonflies mating. These seasonal events are some of the last flights of fall. Learn more about their behavior, ecology, and adaptations in this week’s Natural Connections Podcast!

188 - Flights of Fall in the Boundary Waters

Many native bees build their nests in long cavities. They look for hollow plant stems, beetle holes in trees, and woody twigs they can excavate. Gardeners can help the bees out by leaving flower seed heads standing in the garden all winter long. Then in spring, it’s time to cut them off. After that, the bees move in and you can let nature take her course. Learn more about how to garden for the bees in this week’s podcast with Naturalist Emily Stone.

187 - Save the Bees with a Messy Garden

The few beautiful wildflowers that survive into fall attract a huge number of bumble bees who are completing their annual cycle. New queen bumble bees and drone bees begin to emerge mate with bees from other colonies, and prepare for the winter. For drones and workers, this means death at the first frost. For new queens, this means gorging on nectar and pollen to put on fat layers just like a bear preparing for hibernation. Learn about Naturalist Emily Stone’s observations of these fuzzy fall bees in this episode.

186 - Fuzzy Bees Fattening Up

Here in the Northwoods, we’re lucky to witness a kaleidoscope of colors as trees transition from summer into fall and winter. Autumn is a beautiful time of year, but a sad one, too, as the colorful leaves are dying. The lives and deaths of leaves are fascinating, though, and this week Naturalist Emily Stone elucidates the science behind how leaves grow and then how trees recycle nutrients and store them away for next spring. Red, orange, yellow, purple, and brown compose the resulting rainbow.

185 - Fall Colors Revealed

Photographing baby animals takes luck, skill, and perseverance. This week, Naturalist Emily Stone gathered the “stories behind the photos” that were entered in the Museum’s Northwoods Animal Babies Photo Contest. Stories include sneaking up on cute fawns, observing owl babies in the backyard, and going out every day to observe nature. Once you hear the stories, you can visit the Cable Natural History Museum Facebook page to vote on your favorite photos!

184 - How to Photograph Cute Baby Animals

Naturalist Emily Stone talks about her canoe trip down the Namekagon River, which is protected by the National Park Service. A tiny mussel shell inspires her to be grateful that the river is protected, and to compare the birds and wildlife she sees along the stream to a string of pearls. At the end, she contemplates a quote from poet Mary Oliver from the poem "The Kingfisher," about how the world contains death every day, and every day we must work to find our own splash of happiness and gratitude in order to survive. 

183 - A String of Pearls

182 - Going with the Flow

181 - Sturgeon Survey on the Couderay River

180 - A Monarch’s Demise

179 - Underwater Eyes

178 - A Kid’s Eye View

177 - Cold Trees Have Teeth

176 - Butterflies Live in Layers

175 - Sparkling droplets of baby food and Tyvek

Natural Connections is a weekly newspaper column created by Emily Stone, the Naturalist/Education Director at the Cable Natural History Museum in Cable, Wisconsin. In each episode, Emily reads her fun and informative weekly column about Northwoods Nature.

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Natural Connections

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