Winter, the season with cold, snow, short days and long nights, can be a challenging season to explore the National Park System. Yet it also holds surprises that reveal themselves in shimmering lights darting across the night sky, in tracks of what passed the night before across the snowscape, and in congregations of wildlife.

Photographing birds help flesh out the story of a national park or protected land you visit. Those photos also teach you something about bird life and their environment. You don’t have to be a hardcore birder or an expert in avian photography to photograph birds. Photographer Rebecca Latson provides tips and examples of birds she’s captured on the fly (pun intended) in this month’s photography column, with the aim of helping you and your camera capture your own cool national park bird shots.

Cooking on a backcountry trip in Yellowstone National Park can be challenging, especially when you want to boil a couple chickens. One group solved that problem by placing the plucked birds in a burlap bag and tossing it into a hot spring in the Shoshone Geyser Basin.

National Park Service units are not immune from ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night. In honor of Halloween, here’s a quiz and trivia piece that’s all about those ghosty ghoulies and their associated protected lands. You might learn a little something as your spine tingles and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. BOO!!