photograph by Brian Willson Hermit Thrushes arrive early around here, and leave late. I hadn’t seen any since fledgling season—at which point they grow quiet and even more secretive than usual—until today. In our mid-afternoon hike up the hill this glorious fall day (along with about three dozen other people and a half a dozen […]

photographs and text by Brian Willson This the kind of lovely August Sunday that found me working all morning at the kitchen table, running errands in early afternoon here and there, riding my bicycle up to Camden for a specific bottle of beer and a certain chocolate and walnut brownie at Megunticook Market, and hiking […]

photograph and text by Brian Willson I heard the rain while awakening, so I went back to sleep and didn’t rise until the decadent hour of 7:30 a.m. And I didn’t get out into the drizzle and rain and fog until late this afternoon. With Jack. My dog. Quite a few birds, despite the less-than-ideal […]

photograph by Brian Willson A comment to Brian from fellow photographer Benjamin Magro: One of the things I love about your photographs is that they are all uniquely different as if taken all over the planet and yet they are all just different layers of one tiny location in the universe, Beech Hill. By this […]

photographs and text by Brian Willson Cold and achingly clear today. I shoveled the rest of the walkways, etc., and got a lot of work done. Then went with dog to Beech Hill. Someone—perhaps two people—had tramped down my snowshoe tracks from yesterday, making today’s hike a lot easier. Nobody else hiking while we were […]

photograph by Brian Willson

photographs by Brian Willson For many years I’ve marveled at how crows come in threes—and wondered why. Are they a mating pair and a young adult, their offspring? Are they siblings? Buddies? Cousins? Someone has probably done research on all this, but all I know is the crows often come in threes.

video and text by Brian Willson It’s pretty quiet in the woods and fields these days, as our seasonal residents get their youngsters ready for fall migration, so I thought I’d go back a few weeks and mention a curious peculiarity of summertime bird song. Serious birders soon learn to identify a species by its […]