Now the science part of what’s going on is equally fascinating. You may think that tapping a tree to collect the sap is just like sticking a needle into a human vein and taking blood (and in fact this can be a useful analogy, especially as we stress to people that you can overtap a tree). But contrary to conventional thought, sugarmakers aren’t tapping into a tree’s circulatory system and collecting sap as it’s pulled up from the roots to the branches; rather, the sap they collect is free falling down the trunk of the tree, from top to bottom.

Here’s my understanding of the science:

Maple sapwood contains vertical vessels that move sap (picture them as a bundle of straws). Surrounding these vessels are gas-filled fiber cells.

As a maple tree freezes, ice crystals form in the fiber cells and grow by pulling sap out of the vessels. Since there’s billions of cells in a tree, this process creates considerable energy, which results in suction throughout the tree. Researchers say that during the freezing process, negative pressure at a taphole can be as low as -7.5 PSI. A tree will continue to suck up water from its roots until the sap transportation system becomes frozen solid.

The next day, when the warm spring sun melts the ice crystals in the tree’s fiber cells, the sap re-enters the sapwood vessels and the negative pressure becomes positive pressure (as high as 30 PSI – the equivalent pressure in a car tire – on a good sap day). Gravity and gas bubbles play a big role in creating this pressure (you can see these gas bubbles, like train cars, in a tubing system). The sap that was frozen solid in the maple’s branches free-falls down the trunk and out the taphole. When the pressure diminishes to zero, the sap stops flowing and a sugarmaker must wait for another freeze (as, unfortunately, many are doing as you read this).

The greater the difference between the barometric pressure outside and the internal pressure of the tree, the better the sap run. This explains the effectiveness of tubing vacuum systems. In natural conditions, high barometric pressure can restrict sap flow; vacuum, on the other hand, creates a permanent negative pressure environment.

If you’re interested in learning more about maple science, visit a sugarhouse in the next few weeks and ask questions in between samples.

From a scientific perspective, there is no definitive answer to this question, as the two major players in this story, besides the sugarmaker and the tree, are bacteria and temperature – two notoriously fickle elements.

A taphole is an open wound, which means there’s no way to shield it from naturally occurring bacteria, yeasts, and fungi. These microorganisms take up residence in a tap hole, and they eventually form a gummy barrier that blocks the sap from coming out. Temperature comes into play because these microorganisms are enabled by heat. Like many living things, they’re just not very prolific in the cold.

So. Let’s say weather played by the rules, and outside temperatures got cold in December and stayed cold through February, and on March 1, right on schedule, daytime temps crept up into the 40s and went back down to the high 20s at night. And these temps rose incrementally through mid-April, just like we’re told they did in the good old days. If weather behaved predictably like this, then in theory we could tap trees in December and have productive tapholes right through mid-April. Experiments at the Proctor Maple Research Center in Vermont and other maple research organizations bear this out, and large-scale sugaring operations with tens of thousands of taps start drilling in December and January every year – they have to.

What complicates things is that weather doesn’t behave rationally and never has, which gives smaller scale operators with more tapping flexibility something to agonize over. Bacterial growth is stimulated by warm spikes in the weather, so there is some risk to tapping early. While research shows a negligible flow difference between January-drilled holes and March-drilled holes in the cooler parts of March (35 to 40 degree runs), that changes when the temperature spikes above 50 degrees. Then, early-drilled holes begin to show the effects of a burgeoning bacteria population and they yield less sap than newer holes.

So it’s a big guessing game. At my own sugarbush in southern Vermont, we’ve had years where I’ve felt we’ve tapped too early. We struggled, fighting snow and ice, to boil low-sugar content sap through warm spells in early February, then seemed to get passed, production wise, by more patient sugarmakers who were still making syrup when we weren’t in April. Of course, there have probably been more years where it’s worked the other way, when jackrabbits like us were banking barrels of nice early-season fancy, wondering what the March-tapping turtles were waiting for.

Of course my own experiences are anecdotal and not at all scientific. To read some objective science on the subject, check out a piece that Proctor’s Tim Wilmot wrote on early tapping in the Maple Syrup Digest.

To those in my boat, the elephant-in-the-room question in the wake of the disaster is: why is Haiti the poorest county in the western hemisphere? It seems that reparations paid to slave-owning nations played a role, along with a string of despotic regimes. But most tangible, most visceral, is the environmental degradation of the landscape itself.

By every account I’ve read, Haiti was once a lush tropical island: coffee and sugar plantations nestled between vast expanses of forest. In 1923 sixty percent of the country was covered in stands of pine and broad leaf trees; by 1988, only about 2 percent of the country had tree cover. And it’s still disappearing: according to some credible looking information I found on the internet, reforestation programs in the 1980s planted more than 25 million trees, but in that time as many as seven trees were cut for each new tree that went in the ground.

There are certainly some interesting parallels here to the Industrial Age forests of the Northeast – and maybe some hope in this line of thinking. In the mid-1800s much of our Northern forest was gone (in Vermont, about 75% of the land had been cleared.) Erosion was rampant, water was dirty. Many of the trees cut in Haiti were turned into charcoal – something readers of Hugh Canham’s wood chemical industry story in our winter issue know a lot about. We’ve been there and done that. And by many measures, our forests, our landscapes, have bounced back.

I don’t mean to come off as idealistic in drawing these parallels, and I’m not trying to armchair quarterback a horrible situation from the comforts of my desk. Nineteenth-century New England is not twentyfirst-century Haiti – our growing conditions are different, our historical yokes are different, and certainly, today’s modern world plays by a much different set of rules. But at the same time, it seems that we do have much relevant knowledge we can share about sustainable forestry and agricultural practices.

It goes without saying that some of the $2,400,000,000 in aid that the world has pledged to Haiti will have to subsidize fuel sources that aren’t charcoal, will have to go towards landscape reclamation projects that can bring nature back into alignment. The Northeastern U.S. has had many success and some notable failures (non-native plant introductions spring to mind) on the reclamation front. In many ways, this information can be more valuable than money.

Whatever the solutions are, let’s hope the administrators of the earthquake aid recognize the need to heal the Haitian landscape as a way of healing its people. Let’s hope relevant information can be shared in an efficient, practical way.

“I live on a pond in Southwest New Hampshire and have had some experience with this phenomena in the last 30 years.  It is a form of rime or hoarfrost, which in my experience requires rather exacting conditions, namely, at least single digit temperatures, a perfectly still night, and just the right humidity. I find it curious that it extends not more than 30 feet back from my pond’s edge, maybe reflecting some subtle change in temperature or humidity in that distance, perhaps reflecting a little less radiational cooling of the supporting surface below the sub-freezing dew point, back in the shelter of taller trees.

The pond seems to influence hoarfrost even when the pond surface is locked in ice and covered with snow. The crystals precipitate out of the atmosphere on any surface surrounded by air: needles, twigs, weeds, even other ice surfaces. As the picture with my hand for scale shows, while the structures can achieve considerable size and apparent fluffiness, they remain remarkably delicate and fragile. The least stirring of a morning breeze or a puff of your breath shatters them to sparkle in the morning sun like flakes of mica.”

The ephemeral nature of hoarfrost is especially resonant. One moment it’s there, the next, it’s gone. This impermanence feels important. It’s another example of how the natural world just pulses with beauty - a bobcat flashing through a fir thicket, an unusual cloud formation trolling through a Bahamian blue sky - fleeting images that are there for the taking if you’re in the right spot at the right time.

Do other readers have photographs of unusual frost formations? If so, I’d love to see them. Send low resolution pictures to .

The auger hadn’t run since last February and it took a few good sprays of ether to get the varnish pulsing through the carburetor. Then, the deep gargling sound of the engine. In a minute or so 18 inches of ice was ground to a perfect circle. (While I hate to sully an otherwise serene scene by describing the buzz of an internal combustion engine, I’ve got to report that the sound of a power auger is that of divine progress and angels singing to someone who spent their formative years hacking hundreds of holes through bunker-thick ice with a spud bar).

Soon 24 black holes gaped strangely in that flat expanse of white ice, staring up like recessed fish eyes. A lucky 30-06 casing was sunk to determine the depth of the water – about 10 feet. The water pulsed slightly in the holes, giving the sub-aquatic world an eerie feel. A minnow dragging a fishing line swam bravely into the onyx depths, a little silver star shining, shining, and then dissolving into black.

There are ice fishing days that are marked by the slow crawl of time, days that feature a heavy food and drink element, days passed in long-winded stories, days without fish. This was not one of those days. Half a dozen jacks in and the whip of a tip-up was audible against the morning stillness. “Flag!” was bellowed with enough force that the very sky was served notice. Three men rushing with abandon to the swaying mark, knees high through the snow.

The fish was running and the tip-up’s tin reel spun like a windmill, clacking manically against the trip wire. In some dark underwater place a fat largemouth bass felt her meal tighten against her lip. After a valiant fight, she found herself flopping in an alien world, uninhabitable and blinding white. Some yahoos whooped and hollered and held her briefly by the lip, then, as quickly as the ordeal came, it was over. She swam away fast, then, presumably, kept swimming. If she’d possessed a human brain, she probably would have eventually convinced herself that the whole thing was some strange dream.

It would be a 30-fish day. At times, five or six jacks lay simultaneously on the ice, the action so fast we didn’t have time to re-bait. That first bass was a good one – probably close to four pounds, and we took several chain pickerel girthy enough to have passed for northern pike. We released all but four large perch, whose sweet white meat would later flake delicately after being seared with salt pork, baked with lemon and basil, then drizzled with a balsamic glace.

That evening a hot shower, fresh flannels, and a woodstove removed the final remnants of cold from my bones. There was low light, a hot beverage, and the soft sound of a football game on the radio. It all felt wonderfully complete.

Burns reports that the Canadian government has taken a number of pro-active steps to slow human-caused spread of the insect. They’re trying to police the movement of wood out of the quarantine area; they’re working to develop receiving facilities in the area that are set up to process potentially infested ash; they have a firewood inspection program designed to make sure firewood has no ash in it.

But there’s definitely a you-can-slow-it-but-not-contain-it undercurrent that pervades the report. Burns says that it’s nearly impossible to detect signs of the insect in a lightly infested stand. And once the bug is established, it spreads quickly. While Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) battles in the US effectively utilize slash and burn techniques whereby infested trees are flagged and destroyed, in Carignan, no trees infested with emerald ash borer are being cut. Burns writes: “No attempt is being made to eradicate or isolate the infestation … because this has never worked.” She points out, bluntly, that eradication efforts have been tried repeatedly in the US and Canada and every one has failed. She cites one noteworthy example where, in 2004, a 10-km wide host-free ‘firewall’ was created in Ontario by cutting all ash trees along the eastern edge of the quarantine zone, between Lakes Erie and St. Clair. About 100,000 healthy trees were destroyed. Infested trees were found at a number of sites east of the firewall later that year.

It seems that if there’s any chance to stop this bug, it’s going to have to involve biological control. And the realist in me feels powerless, and a touch foolish, even composing that sentence.

In the meantime, non-scientists like you and me wait and watch as the bug continues to make inroads into the Northern Forest. The one thing we can do is keep banging the drum: don’t move firewood. Don’t move firewood. Don’t move firewood.

In the winter 2007 issue of Northern Woodlands, Adelaide Tyrol profiled artist Kathleen Kolb, a fine painter who chronicles the logging industry in New England. The painting that we published, called Starting the Skidder, depicts a log landing on a winter morning. The scene evokes frozen fingers and squeaky snow, the smell of chainsaw grease and diesel fumes. The weak breaking sunlight in the background is both beautiful and ominously cold.

On January 17th, Kolb and folklorist Ann Ferrell will be at Middlebury College, where they’ll lead a discussion with folks who make their living starting skidders on cold mornings. If you’d like to attend, you can meet the people who appear in Kolb’s paintings and learn more about the work that they do.

The presentation, hosted by the Vermont Folklife Center, begins at 3 pm and will be held at The Franklin Environmental Center, Orchard Room 103.

To view Kolb’s logging paintings, go to www.kathleenkolb.com.

Here’s to rural culture and the synthesis of art and place.

And so in a nice display of commonsensical governance, the feds have introduced a one year pilot program that will bump up interstate weight limits. The measure received broad bipartisan support. Under the plan, trucks weighing more than 80,000 pounds will now get to travel on Interstate highways in Vermont. The new rules will also affect parts of Maine, enabling large truck travel on I-95 north of Augusta. The new weight limit will probably be 99,000 pounds in Vermont.

President Obama signed the bill on Tuesday night, and it’s expected to be implemented by the state legislature within the next few weeks. Truckers are hoping the new regulations become permanent next year. New York and New Hampshire already have alternative mechanisms in place whereby log trucks can be certified to carry loads greater than the federal limit.

The storm arrived at 5 a.m. on Wednesday here in Corinth, carried into the region on winds too light to feel. One minute the pre-dawn sky was ordinary, and then suddenly, the air was in a Christmas way. The snow fell heavy and vertical in the manner of an elementary school play where stagehands dump Styrofoam peanuts from a platform onto actors below. On the way to work, my headlights against the falling snow created a science-fiction moment; it felt as though the truck were a space ship cruising at warp speed through a mob of streaking stars.

We’re presently in a clipper weather system, where north winds are being funneled down aggressively from Canada. In the past 48 hours snow has fallen in every form imaginable: big dollopy lace drops, hard frozen rain drops, feather drops that fluttered like moths against sun cracks in the iron sky. Children have swarmed the sliding hills like otters at a pondside slick: bruised knees, bloody noses, belly laughs. Parallel tracks into the forest indicate that adults have taken some after work play time too – see them skiing through the negative light, the conifers wrapped in snow garland, the hardwood trees puddling in long shadows on the ski trail before them.

It’s cold now – hardly twenty as this newsletter reaches your inbox – and we’re reminded that there’s a price to pay for winter’s splendor. Driveways are iced, fingers are frozen. Fierce wind is howling through meadows and kicking snow skyward in tornadic white sheets. The men and women in the log business, armed with electrical cords, blow torches, and cans of ether, are bending their heads against the dawn and marching through snowbleared log yards to do battle with the gelled diesel in their work rigs. Large-scale sugarmakers are bussing gear into remote sugarbushes before the snow pack gets too deep.

There’s great poetry in winter’s contradictions – its pleasures juxtaposed with its toil. But you live and work here, you still live and work here. And so you already know this.

Is this common? Well, no, but some does will grow antlers (scientists estimate the number at 1 in every 1,000 to 6,000, although there is some evidence that certain areas boast abnormally high numbers – one Canadian study block produced 8 antlered does in a population of 516, or 1 in 64). Antler growth in deer begins in April, and is triggered by the interaction of increasing daylight, testosterone, and the hormone prolactin. According to researchers at the Minnesota DNR, female deer can have a testosterone surge at this time, caused by a hormone imbalance, first pregnancy, tumors, or degenerative conditions of the ovaries or adrenal glands. This single surge can cause the growth of antlers in velvet.

What’s strange about Marsh’s buck, err, doe, however, is that the antlers are polished. According to the Minnesota DNR, for an antler to become polished bone, a second surge of testosterone is necessary. Reproductively functional females will not get the second surge. This seems to suggest that the Marsh buck was probably a pseudohermaphrodite, an animal with external female genitalia but internal male reproductive organs (were it a true hermaphrodite, it would have ambiguous external genitals).

The fact that the animal had a live weight of over 200 pounds seems to add credence to this idea. According to Kent Gustafson, deer project leader for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, the average adult doe in New Hampshire weighs between 110 and 120 pounds. Of the 9,000 does the state has surveyed over the past half century, only 3 have hit 200 pounds, and none recently.

Unfortunately, further examination of the animal will probably not be possible, as the animal’s reproductive tract was never examined before the deer was processed. State conservation officer Tom Dakai did see the deer and verified that it had no external male genitalia. If I learn anything new over the next few weeks, I’ll let you know.