We know coyotes call our area home. Moose, too, have been wandering around recently. Black bears are also on the list of our suburban wildlife. During recent work-related travels, I’ve heard of bears or their tracks being seen in Kent near the Boyd Corners Reservoir and in the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Westchester.

The bear shown above ambled into Purchase one summer day in 2005. He was eventually tranquilized by the state Department of Conservation and taken upstate. Last summer, a bruin or two showed up in Bedford and Spring Valley.

Feel free to share any news of bear sightings with The Nature of Things. You can add a comment to this posting or click on one of our names below a posting to get to an e-mail address.

The second season of work is getting under way at Bear Mountain, where volunteers are reconstructing a portion of the Appalachian Trail.

The public can get involved. Trail-building training sessions are offered for beginners, as well as those ready to hone intermediate skills.

The AT stretches from Maine to Georgia and is 2,174 miles long.

But the four most-traveled miles are those that take hikers over Bear Mountain.

As a result, that section of trail has taken quite a beating, what with all those pounding boots and trail shoes.

Most users are casual hikers visiting Bear Mountain State Park for the day.

The reconstruction seven-year project will reroute the trail, providing a novice-friendly path to the summit, where a handicapped-accessible area will be created (access will be from Perkins Memorial Drive). Trail signs and interpretive exhibits are also to be included.

The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, which is coordinating the work effort, will offer a tour of the new route between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday.

Get more details by logging onto Bear Mountain Trails or by calling 201-512-9348, ext. 26.

A watershed is a basin, and all water falling within that basin makes its way downhill and into streams, creeks and rivers, which eventually enter the world’s oceans.

Watersheds can extend for miles beyond a river’s actual course and, like the river, also face threats from pollution and development.

Local watershed organizations work to highlight the problems and the solutions.

Take the Hackensack Riverkeeper, for example.

The Hackensack is a town down in “Jersey,� but it’s also a river that starts in Rockland, near the Clarkstown/Ramapo border. It provides drinking water to the county by filling the Lake Deforest reservoir, while also supplying many New Jersey communities. So what happens to the river in Rockland also has consequences for the Garden State.

The Hackensck Riverkeeper, a citizen-steward organization, continues to educate the public about the watershed and has just released its 2007 Eco-Program schedule of tours.

Forget about Hoffa and The Sopranos, a tour of the Meadowlands is perfectly safe, the Hackensack Riverkeeper assures us. You can float in a boat, or paddle a canoe or kayak. You can also opt for guided birding tours.

Log onto Hackensack Riverkeeper for more information.

Even more than robins, I find the song of red-winged blackbirds to be a greater harbinger of spring. The small, well, black songbird with red shoulders (The males anyways. Females, like most songbirds, are drab.) show up in wet, marshy areas throughout the Lower Hudson Valley about now. I’ve been hearing them for about a week or 10 days.

Here’s a nice read on red-winged blackbirds and spring.

Just in case you were wondering, check this out.

If a Westchester County lawmaker has his way, incandescent light bulbs may soon be hard to find around here.

Marty Rogowsky, D-Harrison, is proposing county legislation that will ban all such lighting in county-owned buildings after the last day of 2007. In addition, he wants to ban the sale of incandescent light bulbs in Westchester two years later.

“Most of us go through the day in the dark about how individual habits contribute to global warming,” Rogowsky said in announcing the legislation. “We need to turn on the light, so to speak, in all of us and get to the point where everyone is aware that simple painless measures like switching what kind of light bulb you use, are the kinds of battles that will win the war on global warming.”

Rogowsky joins the growing chorus of those who want people to use only compact fluorescents bulbs, which cost more on the front end, but save electricity/money with each use and reduce the need to burn fossil fuels to produce power. That means fewer greenhouse gases being spewed into the environment.

The potential savings in both money and electricity are fairly substantial, as much as 75 percent by some estimates. The compacts last longer too.

I recently started using them at home and though they seem a little dim when you first turn them on, they brighten to full power quickly. It’s a good reminder that the landscape for powering our lives is changing.

Whether Rogowsky can succeed is legislating what can and can’t be sold in Westchester is a question for another time.

You probably don’t. But the white-breasted nuthatches that tend to hang out with black-capped chickadees apparently do. Anyone with a bird feeder in the Lower Hudson Valley can’t help but notice the gray-and-white birds (pictured below) that walk head first down tree trunks.

Long wintertime companions of chickadees — those two plus tufted titmice move in flocks together— nuthatches, according to a University of Washington researcher, are able to understand what chickadees are saying.

Next time you look out your window at the birds congregating around your feeder, you now know they know something you don’t know.

For the scientifically minded, here’s the study’s abstract.

Winter ends and spring officially begins at 8:07 P.M. tomorrow, when the sun crosses directly over the equator. For those who can’t keep their equinoxes straight from their solstices, check out this site from the Royal Observatory in England.

Check out NOAA’s report on how this winter compared to others.

Supposedly. So they say. If you want a glimpse ahead into the next season, check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Spring Outlook. Oh, and don’t forget where you put your snow shovel.

Some of you may remember the story about researchers tracking Hudson River swans by strapping Global Positioning Systems to their backs. As part of their study that began in 2004, Fred Koontz, the executive director of Teatown Lake Reservation, and his colleague, Susan Elbin of the Wildlife Trust ,rounded up eight birds this past summer and placed transmitters on them. Five of the transmitters kept working and Swan No. 507 was the first to leave the area. He headed down to the Jersey shore.

When we last wrote about No. 507, close to the end of January, he was near Toms River N.J. Unfortunately that was about the extent of his travels. Koontz said a motorist found the bird “lethargic on the side of the road” at the end of February. The swan eventually died from lead poisoning, Koontz said, probably from either ingesting fishing sinkers or lead shot. The federal government banned lead shot for waterfowl hunting in the late 80s/early 90s but swans really dig into a river or inlet’s bottom when feeding and could find some old, buried pellets, Koontz said.