With the arrival of warmer weather, birds around New Hampshire have become more vocal and active. It’s almost impossible not to notice them – and spotting and recognizing them can be a lot of fun, too.
If you’re looking for a new way to identify what’s in your back yard or learn about the species you already recognize, the New Hampshire Audubon just launched a new online bird guide, which it’s touting as “everything you need to know” about New Hampshire birds.
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There are currently around 200 avian species in the guide, with more to come. “This is the first time that N.H. specific information on most of the species of birds that occur in N.H. is accessible in one place,” said Pamela Hunt, a senior biologist for avian conservation at the New Hampshire Audubon.
Hunt came up with the idea for the guide, which she said goes beyond a typical field guide. It includes information about where in the state you can find a particular bird, long-term population trends, and relevant stories about the birds. She used decades of New Hampshire-specific data and research to compile the guide, which took her about a year.
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I checked out the entry for the gray catbird, which has been making a ruckus near my house recently. It turns out they’re ubiquitous around the state and well adapted to human landscapes. Close relatives to mockingbirds and thrashers, they are considered “accomplished” singers that can mimic other birds. Interestingly, studies show that “much of their singing is improvised rather than learned, and that each bird has a unique repertoire based partially on what it hears growing up and partially on what it invents as it goes.”
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Bird populations have been on a dramatic decline. Recent estimates found that North America lost lost 3 billion birds in the last 50 years.
Birds are typically considered an environmental indicator – when their population suffers, it can point people toward bigger issues at play. Think: canary in the coal mine.
This story first appeared in Globe NH | Morning Report, our free newsletter focused on the news you need to know about New Hampshire, including great coverage from the Boston Globe and links to interesting articles from other places. If you’d like to receive it via e-mail Monday through Friday, you can sign up here.
Amanda Gokee can be reached at amanda.gokee@globe.com. Follow her @amanda_gokee.
CANDIA, NH (WGME) – Early Monday morning, a Nashua man died following a crash on Route 101 eastbound in Candia, New Hampshire.
Joseph H. Lavoie, 58, of Nashua, had been driving along Route 101 eastbound near Exit 3 when he lost control of his car, resulting in a drift off the right side of the highway before striking the cement bridge at the Old Candia Road overpass.
State troopers arrived at the scene to find Lavoie’s car on fire, though several passing drivers had helped to pull Lavoie out of his car. The fire was quickly extinguished.
Lavoie was taken to the hospital where he later died from his injuries.
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The crash remains under investigation. Anyone with information that may assist the investigation is asked to contact Trooper Kevin LeDoux via email at Kevin.P.LeDeoux@dos.nh.gov.
The biggest national news in 2025 often involved energy — how to make it, who gets to use it, who is going to need it. New Hampshire has sidestepped most of those questions so far but still saw plenty of energy news.
Goodbye, coal
The closing of the Merrimack Station power plant in Bow sounds like New Hampshire’s biggest energy news of the year and got a lot of national coverage along the lines of “New England shuts down coal!” but to be honest, it didn’t make much difference. The plant had been winding down for years, having run for fewer than 30 days in 2024, and would almost certainly have shut in a year or so because it lost what is known as capacity funding.
The more interesting question is what will replace it. Granite Shore Power President Jim Andrews has long touted plans to turn Merrimack Station, as well as the long-closed Schiller site in Portsmouth, into 21st century power plants using batteries and solar power, with perhaps some offshore wind assembly on the shores of the Piscataqua River.
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But Donald Trump was elected and promptly began to trash wind and solar power, yanking subsidies and throwing up regulatory roadblocks. Granite Shore now says it is looking at all possibilities.
Both sites have excellent connections to the power grid, which makes them very valuable.
We need more electricity
New Hampshire, like New England in general, have not been swamped with proposals to build massive, power-hungry data centers for bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence. Those proposals have led to forecasts that national demand for electricity will spike by a quarter or more within a few years.
ISO-New England, the group that runs the six-state power grid, projects an 11% increase in electricity demand over the next decade, largely driven by the electrification of heating and transportation. That’s a lot, especially after years of stagnant demand, but it’s not panic-inducing.
Sidestepping regulation
New Hampshire is set to become the first state to allow energy providers to skip most utility regulation if they don’t connect to the grid. Supporters say it adds much-needed flexibility to the hidebound energy industry while critics call it a sop to very large energy users, such as data centers. It’s not clear how much it will be used, but it’s an interesting experiment, at least.
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Community solar OK, wind not so much
The Republican-controlled legislature isn’t quite as anti-solar power as President Trump but it shows a lack of enthusiasm for renewable energy. They passed a bill loosening stormwater runoff rules for solar arrays but tightened the Renewable Energy Fund and as the year ended, they were looking to make severe changes to the Renewable Energy Portfolio.
On the other hand, there’s community solar. Thanks to a series of bills over the past few years, arrays up to 5 megawatts can share production with multiple customers, making big projects that opened or are being built in Exeter, Bedford, Derry, Warner and now Concord financially feasible. It seems likely that 2026 will set a record for the most solar added to the grid in New Hampshire. If the legislature would let private companies be community-solar customers, we’d do even better.
As for wind power, legislators echoed Trump’d hatred of the industry. Gov. Ayotte agreed to shorten the name of the Office of Offshore Wind Industry Development and Energy Innovation to simply the Office of Energy Innovation as part of removing virtually all support for wind power on land or in the sea. Not that we gave much support to begin with.
Ironically, this month saw New England receive a record amount of power from wind turbines — more than 1,600 megawatts at one point — as the Vineyard Wind offshore farm finally got up to speed.
What about natural gas? Nuclear? Heating oil?
As has been the case for many years, natural gas was the fuel to supply about half of New England’s electricity in 2025 and heating to about one-fifth of New Hampshire’s homes.
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Many politicians are making noises about building more pipelines to bring in more natural gas from New York or Pennsylvania; Gov. Ayotte expressed support for bringing the proposed Constitution Pipeline, which was killed in 2020, back to life. Many argue that such work would be prohibitively expensive and make the region even more dependent on a single type of fuel.
Natural gas has traditionally been very cheap compared to other types of fuel but its price is increasingly affected by global patterns because of an increase in exports.
A separate question is whether the push to electrify the region’s heating can cut into our use of heating oil. Northern New England is by far the national leader in using that dirty fuel for heating; switching to electric heat pumps is almost always cheaper and definitely cleaner. New Hampshire is one of five states in the New England Heat Pump Accelerator, which looks to spend $450 million from Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to encourage more heat pumps.
NASHUA, N.H. (AP) — A pilot was taken to the hospital with injuries Wednesday after a small plane crashed into a residential neighborhood in southern New Hampshire, authorities said.
Emergency crews found the aircraft upside down in a snow bank in the parking lot of a wooded condominium complex in Nashua Wednesday afternoon.
Police said the pilot was the only person on board and was the only person injured. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating.
The Velocity V-Twin plane crashed at the Cannongate Condominiums shortly after departing from the nearby Nashua Airport around 2:10 p.m. local time, according to the FAA.
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Aerial video from NBC10 Boston showed damage to the roof of one of the condos near the crash site.
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