Field Work Archive
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At Work Rebuilding a Castle with Mark Fenwick
From the trees he harvests, Mark Fenwick sculpts his dreams. At the end of his dirt drive in Guilford, Vermont, a dancing bear, larger than life, poses on one paw, beguiling passersby. Beyond it, an abstract Buddha spirals away from the world, wielding a feather like a saber. Why a feather? He smiles wryly. “Lightness of being, perhaps.” By the… (more)
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At Work Reading Landscapes with Ecologist and Teacher Tom Wessels
It’s a still, misty afternoon in Westminster, Vermont, and low-angled sun rays are piercing the water droplets, making everything seem preternaturally bright. Tom Wessels pulls on his boots in the doorway of his scribe-fit log home, made from white pine harvested from the property. He and his wife began building the cabin more than 30 years ago. “It’s still not… (more)
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Field Work
“I’m having a bad morning,” Chris Rimmer says, waving a black nylon mist net at me. It’s 4:30 a.m. on top of Mt. Mansfield, and Rimmer has had only four hours of sleep. He’s been up since 3 a.m., but he missed catching any Bicknell’s thrushes still brooding on the nest. Now, faced with the morning’s second tangled net, he… (more)
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At Work Sheltering Herps with Christina Hazelton
There is only one place Christina Hazelton, founder of the Upper Valley Reptile Group, likes to see a red-eared slider paddling by an Eastern painted turtle: on the shelf at her organization’s headquarters in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the two turtles have their aquariums set up side-by-side. Red-eared sliders, native to the southern U.S., are inexpensive to purchase and have… (more)
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Melissa Fierke
Melissa Fierke’s journey to becoming assistant professor of forest entomology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, began when the former loan officer discovered a love of hiking, though she quickly discovered that an entomologist is never able to simply walk in the woods. Today, mind-clearing hikes have evolved into page-turning mysteries. “Everywhere, driving along… (more)
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At Work Turning Wood with Richard Montague
The nineteenth-century English bodger is a romantic figure in woodturning lore. Members of that extinct breed made their living in the hilly beech forests north of London. They felled trees, split logs, and shaped the wood into wagonloads of chair legs and spindles for the large Windsor chair factories nearby. Alone or with a partner, the bodger set up in… (more)
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At Work with Taxidermist Leon Verville
In the basement of the New Hampshire Fish and Game department’s Concord office, down an industrial gray set of stairs, and through a hallway that smells like an elementary school library, a visitor comes to a nondescript door that opens into a museum-quality panoramic scene. There’s a fisher scrambling down a birch tree, a bobcat poised on a rock ledge,… (more)
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At Work with Bob Haines
Connecticut forester, logger, and all-around woodskeeper Bob Haines abides by two principles: waste not, want not; and take the time to do it right. Haines has an aura of calm thoughtfulness. His clothes emanate that fuelly wood smell of a chainsaw. His hands are pure callus from years of tinkering and grasping. Haines has lived in central Connecticut all of… (more)
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At Work Procuring Wood for Biomass Plants with Hunter Carbee
Every community has its hubs: those people who tie disparate strands of the network together, who collect and distribute information. For the forest products industry in northern New England, one of them is Hunter Carbee. The former logger, forester, and advocate now makes his living coordinating the wood chip supply for biomass energy facilities, which are increasing in number in… (more)
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At Work Guiding in the Adirondacks with Lynn Malerba
In winter, Lynn Malerba’s peak experiences don’t occur on mountaintops. Her idea of a great February weekend is to teach a small group of novice explorers how to thrive on the valley floor, by confronting the challenges of winter camping. Malerba is a New York State Licensed Guide, and to make the title more distinguished, she’s an Adirondack guide, following… (more)