The Middlebury College Teaching and Research Natural Area is a 20-ha area adjacent to the main campus and the college’s athletic fields. It is composed primarily of a mixture of floodplain forest, riparian forest, and wetlands, but also includes a field that is kept open through periodic mowing in order to support populations of grassland-breeding songbirds. The area is used regularly by the department’s course on Vertebrate Natural History as the location of a bird banding station (and hence the natural area’s nickname:The Bird Sanctuary). We now have over 25 years of data collected by students in this course on the migratory behavior of almost 40 different species of songbirds that move through this region of the Champlain Valley as they travel south for the winter. The Natural Area includes an extensive network of walking trails, which makes it easy to visit and conduct research throughout the site.

The 350-acre main campus of Middlebury College is located in the Champlain Valley between Vermont’s Green Mountains to the east and New York’s Adirondack Mountains to the west. The campus is situated on a hill to the west of the village of Middlebury, a traditional New England village centered on Otter Creek Falls.

Middlebury’s campus is characterized by quads and open spaces, views of the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, and historic granite, marble, and limestone buildings. Old Stone Row, consisting of the three oldest buildings on campus, Old Chapel, Painter Hall, and Starr Hall, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Painter Hall, constructed in 1815, is the oldest extant college building in Vermont. Emma Willard House, a National Historic Landmark, hosts the admissions office.

Since the mid-1990s, student housing has been grouped into five residential Commons: Atwater, Brainerd, Cook, Ross, and Wonnacott.

Visitors to Middlebury College are asked to follow campus visitor policies. See Visiting Campus for information about visiting the college.