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Popular Discussions
- Clearing the Air: Outdoor Wood Boilers Face Regulation (30)
- Lumber, Chips, and Sawdust: For Sawmills, There’s No Such Thing as Waste (12)
- Indian Pipe (9)
- Tale of the Tick: How Lyme Disease is Expanding Northward (8)
- Forests Can’t Fight Climate Change (7)
- First Snow (5)
- Bears Fattening Up for Winter’s Slumber (5)
- Opening Camp (5)
- Wood Pellets (5)
- Wet Weather Wondering (5)
- In Sight of the Property Line (5)
- The Haitian Landscape (4)
- Log Trucks and Highways (4)
- Mill Prices: Autumn 2009 (4)
- Alarms Ring As Borer and Beetle Move This Way (4)
Features Archive
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Bats on the Brink: White-nose syndrome hits home
If this story were a movie, it might best begin with a flashback. After the opening credits, perhaps backed by an ominous soundtrack, we’d be transported back two years, to a happier time before white-nose syndrome had wiped out roughly 90 percent of the local bat population. It is September 2007, and Scott Darling, the bat biologist for Vermont’s Fish… (more)
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The Wood Chemical Industry in the Northeast: An Old Industry with New Possibilities
With the discovery that crude oil could be refined into a seemingly endless variety of products, petroleum became one of the most important substances on earth. Now, more than a century later, oil has lost some of its allure in the U.S., primarily due to climate change and our overdependence on unpredictable foreign sources. Today, scientists are scrambling to find… (more)
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Which Bird Made That Nest?
The diversity of behavior among bird species is nowhere so dramatic as in their nest construction. Each species builds a specifically precise nest that differs in functional ways from those of almost all others. The variations are as endlessly diverse as the color patterns on a feather. Chimney swifts use their saliva to glue dry twigs onto vertical walls in… (more)
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Balsam, Bunches, and Bows: How to Make a Wreath
On a raw December day in northern Vermont, with a nor’easter bearing down on New England, the kitchen in Sarah Taparauskas’s circa 1850s farmhouse is a warm, inviting place to spend an afternoon. A fire blazes in the woodstove, and the scent of freshly cut balsam fills the space. Dressed in a grey woolen hat and worn Carhartt pants, her… (more)
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Anatomy of an Ice-damaged Sugar Maple
I have been managing woodlots in central Vermont since 1987, and in that time, two major ice storms have hit my area. Those two storms damaged thousands of acres across the region, and many landowners each time chose to salvage timber. Since 1987, I have managed salvage operations on 6,000 acres of sugar maple and northern hardwood stands in Windsor… (more)
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Velvet “Rub Out”
Early September is not yet luminous with brilliant foliage, and there’s no reliable tracking snow. Yet for deer hunters and naturalists alike, there’s a palpable excitement in the air; moose and deer are in the pre-rut, and there is more of their sign to be seen. Daylight hours are fewer now. Increased testosterone levels in the blood of bulls and… (more)
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It Pays to Keep Good Trees Growing
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, service foresters working for the state or for cooperative extension marked a lot of timber sales for landowners. I was one of those foresters in New York, and I thought I did a fair job of marking timber. After those years behind the paint gun, I had the opportunity to learn from USDA Forest… (more)
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A Logger with Four Feet and a Tail
Sherman Hollow, where I live, was undoubtedly originally made habitable to humans by beavers. The road now cuts through this valley and along the drainage that runs between steep hills. A series of level areas along this drainage are probably attributable to centuries of occupancy and work by beavers, and these areas are kept open by beavers to this day.… (more)
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A National Park Like No Other: Managing the Legacy Forests at a Birthplace of Conservation
At first glance, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Woodstock, Vermont, seems like your typical national historic site. The grounds are stately, punctuated by a proper mansion, sprawling gardens, and meticulously maintained outbuildings. Visitors are free to stroll along the trails, take in the views, and cool themselves by a 14-acre pond, known to all as “The Pogue.” What separates… (more)
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Local Color: Finding Wild Sources for Dye in the Forest
Each autumn, deciduous leaves transform the northern forest into a cheerful collage of oranges, reds, yellows, purples, and greens. Yet beneath this fleeting canopy grow longer-lasting and subtler sources of natural color: plants, mushrooms, and lichens that are used to dye wool and other fibers. Many of these dye species are not showy or immediately obvious, but they pack a… (more)