Butterflies are perhaps the most accessible. Find flowers and you will find great spangled fritillary, Milbert’s tortoise-shell, dreamy duskywing, and others with equally intriguing names. Butterflies also frequent other sunny openings–wetlands, home gardens, logging roads, and even the high peaks of the Appalachian Trail. Some butterflies are wired genetically to search for mates at open mountain summits, kind of like butterfly singles bars. Or should you round a corner in the trail one day to find your first early hairstreak, a tiny butterfly colored in shocking cobalt blue and mint green marked with little orange lightning bolts, you will most certainly want to quit your job and become a lepidopterist.

Should you prefer something larger, the moose-watching season runs all year. But spring through fall tends to be best in northern New England. Encountering the largest animal in our woods is a goal of most any self-respecting wildlife watcher. And I shall acknowledge that it is perhaps one wildlife watching experience many people can and should pursue from a motor vehicle.

Moose like our roads. Roadside ditches are sources of natural minerals or sodium from road salt. Roadways themselves can offer summertime relief from biting insects and wintertime transportation corridors. Moose tend to visit roads from dusk until dawn. So evenings and early mornings are best. “We call 4:30 moose-thirty,” says Shannon LeRoy, camps and programs manager for AMC’s Maine Woods Initiative, who has seen countless moose in and around the woods and ponds of Maine. She points out that moose can get cranky when provoked. So never approach a moose, particularly a cow with calves or a bull in the fall rut. Also, watch for signs of agitation. A moose about to charge (and stomp you) may lick its lips, raise the hair on its neck (hackles), and flatten its ears. Don’t let it happen.

FIND MORE
See a list of recommended field guides and web sites for spotting wildlife.

Seeing and Not Seeing Wildlife
Should you prefer to escape the car for your outdoor adventures, consider walking miles in the woods without actually seeing wildlife. After all, our most charismatic animals—moose and mink, bear and bobcat—are pretty good at hiding when we’re in the woods. Yet throughout the year, particularly in winter, many wildlife watchers are more than content to follow tracks, scat, pee, scrapes on trees, holes in the snow, or a few wisps of fur here and there.

Tracking is more than following a set of prints and hoping to catch up with what left them. It is learning to interpret the clues animals leave behind in the woods. As tracker, photographer, and author Paul Rezendes likes to say, “The forest is speaking to us all the time.” All we must do to listen is get out and read tracks and sign. One need not see the chase to discover how far a deer can leap through snow with a coyote on its tail. Bite marks on spruce can reveal a route through the woods bears have traveled for generations. And you may not see the squirrel but you can certainly find its remains in the pellet coughed up by a barred owl.

In fact, Pizzo, who guides tracking outings for AMC, says our goal is not necessarily to see the animal, which can cause it stress or make it expend energy it may need for survival. So rather than follow an animal in its tracks, Pizzo walks to where it had been instead of to where it is going. “Backtrack to see what the animal was doing,” she advises, “and figure out the story from there.”

Rarely, however, you may learn another kind of lesson in humility, and on some rainy day at an odd bend in the trail, the wildlife may actually find you instead.

Bryan Pfeiffer is an author, photographer, nature guide, and consulting naturalist specializing in birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. He lives on Bartlett Hill in Plainfield, Vt.

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