The hike to Lions Head on the section of the Appalachian Trail that passes through Salisbury is high on my list of the best half-day hikes in Connecticut. If you like to hike and haven’t done this one, well, it is a must-do.

It was 51 degrees and windy when I arrived atop Mohawk Mountain about 9:45 yesterday morning. Sitting on a rock was an older woman, wearing warm clothes and gloves.

Visiting the Hartland Historical Society in Vermont, historian Bill Hosley of Enfield, Ct., came upon a paper written in 1907 by a prominent local farmer, Byron P. Ruggles.

It was a hand-typed, 10-page manuscript with the less-than-compelling title “Modern vs. Conservative Dairying.” Hosley began reading

If it were possible to calculate an index of happiness, two numbers ought to be part of the formula – rivers explored, trails hiked.

I do not know exactly how many trail guides and river guides I own. Glance over my shoulder and I see seven shelves of them in my study.

More than 10 years ago I devoted two mornings searching for the red-cockaded woodpecker in ideal pine forest habitat in north Florida. I don’t recall seeing a woodpecker either time, never mind the red-cockaded, which is an endangered species now found in only 11 states mostly in the southeastern U. S. The U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates there are perhaps 14,000 of the birds, a tiny fraction of what their numbers were centuries ago and a dangerously small number for a bird species.

About a month ago, a harlequin duck appeared in the Farmington River on a stretch of water that parallels Garden Street. It is a most unusual place for the harlequin, winter or summer, and the question now is, how long will it remain?

Paddling my kayak on Dunning Lake in Farmington, Ct., one day late last year I passed close to shore near an apartment complex and happened upon a middle-aged man crouched at the edge of the water. He was washing a paint tray and roller.

Perhaps the closest thing we have to wilderness in New England is the vast forest overspreading much of inland central and northern Maine. It is rugged, mountainous land thick with spruce and fir, laced with clear streams and rivers and dotted with deep, cold lakes.

It is as if there are two Connecticut Rivers.

There is the beautiful Connecticut, picturesque, spanned by covered bridges, framed by mountains, rich with cultural history, with large and luxuriant marshes at its mouth.