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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)
Knots and Bolts Archive
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New Spile Increases Sap Flow
The big buzz this spring in maple sugarmaking circles involves the new check-valve spouts that many sugarmakers with vacuum systems are trying for the first time. The spiles were invented by Tim Perkins at the University of Vermont’s Proctor Maple Research Center. According to Perkins, in the spring of 2009, the spouts produced a seasonal total of 44.6 gallons of… (more)
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Safe Passage
Crossing a four-lane highway that sees 50,000 vehicles a day can be a daunting task for an animal. So a group of organizations and individuals in Concord, Massachusetts, teamed up with MassHighway to install wildlife-friendly box culverts under a suburban stretch of Route 2. Since the project’s completion in 2005, the Wildlife Passages Task Force, an eight-person volunteer group of… (more)
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Four Centuries of Slow Growth
While conducting a study of old-growth trees at Huntington Forest in Long Lake, New York, research specialists Steve Signell and Colin Beire came across a fairly nondescript, fallen hemlock tree. The tree had blown over and blocked a path; it had subsequently been cut and pushed to one side. Though the tree was only 20 inches in diameter, the dense… (more)
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If Winter Comes, Can Springtails Be Far Behind?
Given an estimated around-the-globe average of 100,000 of them per cubic meter of soil, it seems astonishing that springtails (the tiny creatures often called “snowfleas”) are frequently overlooked. Spotty distribution isn’t to blame for their invisibility. They occur in woodland and in grassland, in deserts and on permanent Arctic snowfields, in caves and greenhouses, even on fresh and salt water.… (more)
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Wood Industry Woes Drag On
“It’s a weird time in the wood industry,” said Bob De Geus, wood utilization specialist with Vermont’s Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation. He paused then, trying to synthesize hard data, speculation, and the fighting spirit of the men and women in the woods business into a sound bite he could give a journalist who was asking way too broad… (more)
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Wasps versus Borers
The adult emerald ash borer (EAB) is a beautiful, metallic-green beetle, too pretty, it would seem, to be so deadly. And yet, in its larval form, the EAB has killed millions of ash trees since its inadvertent introduction to Michigan in 2002. This notorious insect, in the family of wood-boring beetles called the Buprestidae, is now spreading east from Pennsylvania,… (more)
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Turn the Clocks Back and Look Out for Deer
When the first week of November rolls around, drivers are more apt to notice dead deer along the sides of highways. You may have heard that hunting is the cause – that hunters scare deer from the woods and that the roving animals are then more likely to be struck by cars. This is not true. But a human activity… (more)
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Correction
On our Mill Prices page in the Summer 2009 issue, we presented a chart showing the sawlog value of red maple versus sugar maple. Our caption suggested that the dollar amounts on the left-hand axis showed the price paid to landowners. Of course, these figures, and all the figures on the mill prices page, reflect what mills and buyers pay… (more)
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The Northeast’s Ecological Outbox
Russian olive, Norway maple, Japanese honeysuckle – in terms of flora alone, the Northeast is inundated by exotic invasive guests that just won’t go home. But what about people in Russia, Norway, and Japan? Do they have unwelcome biological tourists, too? What happens when the shoe is on the other foot, when our good, harmless species go overseas and, like… (more)
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The Luxury of Old Age
Have you noticed a few more wisps of gray of late? An ache in your joints? Crow’s feet clawing around the corners of your eyes? If so, you’re well on your way to becoming a victim of one of the leading causes of death in the world today: aging. Known to biologists as “senescence,” it’s the systemic degradation of an… (more)