Feathers are arguably the most complex of all vertebrate skin coverings and are an outstanding example of evolutionary innovation. Light, strong, and durable, they perform many different functions for birds and the structures of feathers are diversified to suit their various roles. Feathers are shaped as airfoils for flight, fluffed for insulation, or smoothed and overlapped for weatherproofing. The latter two qualities allow birds to survive extraordinary cold, from the minus 25oF of a New England winter night to the unimaginable minus 75oF endured by emperor penguins in Antarctica.

When you look at a bird, what you see are the feathers known as contour feathers, the outermost layer of the bird’s plumage. Each feather is composed of a hollow shaft from which sprout on either side hundreds of fine, parallel branches, called barbs. Like a fractal pattern, each barb also has side branches, or barbules. Every barbule is equipped with a series of minute hooks along one side, which lock into a groove in the adjoining barbule. When all the barbules are locked together they create a smooth, water repellant surface, known as the feather’s vane. If hooks and grooves get separated they are easily repaired; the bird simply draws the vane through its beak. Countless overlapping contour feathers keep out the wind and weather and give birds their aerodynamic shape.

But there’s more beneath that smooth surface. Many contour feathers have a second feather attached to their base. These are known as semiplumes, and unlike contour feathers, most of their barbs are loose and fluffy and don’t interlock. Only the tip resembles the vane of a contour feather. The job of semiplumes is to plump out the contour feathers and provide insulation, while their small vanes fill any spaces between contours. Semiplumes also clothe the bird’s skin in tight anatomical spaces, such as the bases of wings, because they are highly flexible.

Down, the highly prized fill of quality jackets, forms the insulating undercoat of a bird’s plumage. Down is radically different from other feathers, having only a tiny shaft topped with a head of fluffy, springy barbs that do not zipper together and thus are able to trap a lot of air. Down is particularly well-developed in water birds like ducks and geese that spend a great amount of time with breasts and bellies submerged. We are familiar with the word “eiderdown,” which has come to mean a down comforter, but originated from the down of the seagoing eider duck. Eiders often nest on exposed shorelines. To keep incubating eggs warm, female eiders pluck out their breast down to line the nest.

The intricate organization of feathers continues at the chemical level.
Feathers are built from a specialized protein called beta-keratin. This is a sheet-like structure bonded tightly together by sulphur atoms, which are the source of the unpleasant smell when feathers are burned. The dense framework of beta-keratin makes feathers strong yet springy and accounts for the fact that a down jacket can be stuffed into a pocket, yet puff right up again when unpacked.

On very cold days, birds look puffy and fluffed-up, yet on mild winter days they look quite sleek. Birds can vary the loft of their plumage because their feathers are connected to sheets of muscle within the skin, known as erector muscles. When the weather calls for extra insulation, the erector muscles pull the feathers into a more upright position. This allows the down to expand and trap more air to increase the insulation value of the plumage.

The complexity of feather structure leads one to wonder why and how they would have evolved. The theory was that feathers evolved for flight. However, in 1997, the fossil of a dinosaur bearing primitive tube-like feathers was unearthed in northern China. Subsequent fossils showed a group of related dinosaurs with feathers ranging from down to contour-like, yet their skeletons were completely unsuited to flight. One can only speculate why earthbound dinosaurs had feathers. Was it for camouflage, or insulation? Maybe, like that puffed-up chickadee at the bird feeder, they survived – and thrived – through keeping warm.

Clearly something has changed, and it’s not good for spruce.

A primary culprit is acid rain. Yes, it’s still happening and it’s still causing a range of environmental problems. As our rain, fog, snow, sleet, and ice become acidified from sulfur and nitrogen pollutants produced upwind, a cascade of negative effects is triggered in our forests downwind. For decades now, ecologists have implicated such acidic precipitation in forest health decline and tree mortality – especially in our high-elevation sprucefir forests, which tend to receive more precipitation. But only relatively recently have forest scientists begun to piece together the specific causal mechanism of spruce decline. And those reddish-orange needles have helped guide the way.

Dr. Paul Schaberg is a research plant physiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service in Burlington, Vermont. Schaberg and his long-time collaborators, including University of Vermont Research Associate Gary Hawley, have published dozens of scientific studies on the ecology of northeastern forests. They report that winter injury occurs to some extent every year somewhere on the landscape, but that severe, region-wide injury was documented with a four- to five year return cycle for much of the 1980s and 1990s. Then the phenomenon appeared more muted for a time, as Schaberg explains, possibly because many of the most susceptible trees had already died. And then came 2003.

Schaberg tells of riding a chairlift at Vermont’s Mt. Ellen that winter and noticing – where he hadn’t just weeks before – great numbers of red spruce showing the classic reddening of needles. It turns out he was witnessing one part of the most intense episode of red spruce winter injury ever quantified. Curiously, the balsam fir growing right among those spruce in those same conditions showed no evidence of freezing damage, while the spruce were announcing it loudly in color. This is a fundamentally important part of Schaberg’s and Hawley’s story: red spruce is uniquely sensitive to the effects of acid precipitation on those mountains.

All northern tree species undergo physiological changes in autumn as they prepare for winter. Chief among these changes is acclimation to shorter days and lower temperatures. Each species develops cold tolerance to different degrees – literally. Red spruce is inherently and naturally less cold tolerant than balsam fir. That is, in controlled laboratory tests, red spruce often show significant freezing injury at about -25°F, whereas balsam fir can survive artificially induced temperatures below -75°F. But acid precipitation decreases the red spruce’s ability to withstand cold.

Here’s how Schaberg and Hawley explain it. Acid deposition leaches calcium from red spruce needles and depletes soil calcium as well. This is critical because trees absorb calcium from soil through their roots and use it in a great variety of protective functions, such as in the creation of antioxidants and in the development of cold tolerance in needles. In other words, increases in acids lead to decreases in tree calcium, and decreases in tree calcium lead to decreases in cold tolerance. Because of acid deposition, red spruce needles become vulnerable to freezing at temperatures they had typically tolerated back when more calcium was available.

According to Schaberg and Hawley, winter injury in red spruce due to decreased cold tolerance is but one example of how acid precipitation-induced calcium depletion in forests disrupts the stress-response system of trees. In the case of red spruce, it decreases a tree’s ability to deal with cold. But a shortage of calcium may cause other problems for spruce, and for other species, too, when they are confronted with different stresses, such as drought, insects, and disease.

Spend a day running for tip-ups (also known as “jacks” in some places), and the ice-fishing muscle will reveal itself to you by throbbing steadily. With the soreness comes realization that, with the exception of the occasional bathtub mishap, our legs are unaccustomed to struggling for purchase on gripless surfaces. This muscle, then, must be the last line of defense in such an instance – the difference between a vertical and a horizontal pose.

We’ve been using our ice-fishing muscles a lot during this largely snowless winter. The ice was about 12 inches thick as of last weekend where I fish, and while we did get snow recently, for the most part we’ve been chasing flags by dashing headlong across mixed-media surfaces. You get a good head of steam on the snowy part of the lake, then hit a 20-foot run of sheer ice, then more snow, then more ice, you get the idea.

In theory, we’d be exercising our ice-fishing muscles less if we walked or jogged to the flags instead of sprinting, but when you fish with your younger brother this is impossible. As anyone with siblings can attest, you intellectually outgrow your adolescent competitive streak but the muscle memory is always there. In church, for instance, you might still find yourself subconsciously opting for a crushing handshake at the peace-be-with-you part without even meaning to. It’s sort of the same thing on the ice, where a dash to a flag is always taken at full speed and may include a hip check or stray elbow for old-time’s sake; even if once you get to the flag you take turns pulling in the fish and resume acting like people in their mid-30s.

The fishing has been good this winter and only promises to get better. We fish a lake full of perch, chain pickerel, and largemouth bass. We relish the bass for their fight and, as the law dictates, we let them all go. The perch we catch are a disappointment in a sporting sense but the big ones serve as a fine gastronomical conciliation prize. We filet the keepers right on the ice and fry the sweet meat over a camp fire. Dredged in basic seasoning, the filets curl against the cast iron pan then settle before flaking apart beneath your fork.

In all my years of fishing I’ve yet to come up with a use for the occasional gill-snagged pickerel we keep. Rumors abound that they can be eaten but in all my attempts they just tease me. I’ve thrown my whole culinary repertoire at them, but no matter how they’re cooked, I’m always left with a delicious smelling, lusciously textured slab of meat that proves too bony to eat. It’s like biting into a pin cushion.

If any of you fishermen or women out there have a pickerel-cooking trick up your sleeve, by all means share.

According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), there are about five million free-ranging, feral swine living in the U.S. and they’re wreaking havoc on native ecosystems. If you were a ball-shaped bird, all that destruction might be enough to make you want to launch yourself at the swine with a slingshot.

Feral swine come from two sources: pigs escaped from farms and European wild boars escaped from hunting preserves. Since they are escaped captive species and not native here, they’re called “feral,” not wild.

On the lam, even the farm piggies quickly revert to something tusked and hairy. The young are known as stripers, for their striped tan, white, and black fur. These pigs are more Pumbaa than Porky.

Feral swine are rooting up golf courses and farm fields throughout the American South. They’ve overturned tombstones in a state cemetery in Oklahoma. They gobble up the eggs of turtles and ground-nesting birds. They chow down on salamanders and even the occasional deer fawn. And because they are not native to this continent, they have no natural predators here.

The swine are predominantly a southern problem, buy they’re moving north. In 1982, there were established feral pig populations in 17 states; today, they’re found in 38. There are few hundred of them in New Hampshire. Vermont has the occasional feral oinker – one caused an accident on I-91 in 2010 – but so far, they are not known to breed there.

The feral swine in our area have been here for a while. “I’ve been here for 18 years, and feral swine have been here for all that time, and even before,” says Mark Ellingwood, wildlife supervisor with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.

Most of the feral swine in New Hampshire are found in Grafton, Sullivan, and Cheshire counties. A large game preserve in the area is a suspected source, although Ellingwood reports that the feral swine are now breeding outside of the preserve’s fence, which means that the population is now increasing by the litter (three to 13 piglets), instead of by the occasional adult escapee

“We’ve had animals as far north as Littleton, and in southern New Hampshire as well,” says Ellingwood. “It’s a stretch to claim we know the source of all these animals.”

“Years ago I used to think that the climate would preclude them from surviving in the wild here,” says Scott Darling, wildlife management program director for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. But recently, he notes, breeding feral swine were reported in upstate New York. There are populations in other northern states and in Canada.

Darling says Vermont is vulnerable both to feral swine crossing from New Hampshire, and from the state’s own game preserves, some of which stock wild European boar.

Parker Hall, the state director for New Hampshire and Vermont for the USDA’s Animal and Plant Inspection Service (APHIS), says there is no reason to wait around to see what damage feral swine will do in New Hampshire. They already have a record of destroying cornfields and rooting up people’s backyards.

While his voice drips of Tupelo honey (his previous posting included Alabama and Georgia), his message is pure Dirty Harry: “We know they are bad,” Hall says. “The damage that they do has been documented for years.” The solution, he suggests, is to trap and kill them.

Hall says the state listed Blanding’s turtles, marble salamanders, and spotted turtles are in the feral swine’s crosshairs. Without quick action, Hall explains, the feral swine may eat the last of these vulnerable creatures in the state.

Luckily, he says, years of experience in other parts of the country can be applied to feral swine in the Northeast. Creating a hunting season for them is one idea. However, Hall says hunters can only reduce feral swine populations by 20 percent – too few to make an impact on the population.

The trick, he says, is to trap them in a fenced enclosure using sour corn as bait. The trapping is done in the winter, when the feral swine aren’t chowing down on their very favorite food, acorns.

Who knows, he might be able to teach those angry birds a thing or two.

Bats need dry, warm quarters of a certain size during the summer. During the day, they prefer to wedge into small crevices of ¾ to 1 inch, and they like it hot – somewhere between 80° and 100°F. That’s why your roasting attic is so appealing to them.

You will need several pieces of wood, including three pieces of ½-inch exterior grade plywood: one 20-by-16 inches (for the front), one 24-by-16 inches (for the back), and one 16-by- 3 inches (the roof). You’ll also need three pieces of one-inch thick (or ¾-inch finished) pine lumber to use as furring strips: two pieces 18½-by-1½-inches for the sides and one 16-by-1½-inches piece for the top. The larger piece of plywood is what the bats will cling to as they roost, so you’ll need to provide some texture for them to grab. Use a rasp or skill saw to add kerfs to one side of the plywood. You could, instead, fasten a 13-by-24-inch piece of insect netting onto the plywood for traction, but hold off until completing the next step if you plan to do that.

Stain the textured side with a dark exterior stain, then staple on the netting, if you are using it. Attach the furring strips to the rough side of the plywood with 1-inch exterior grade screws and exterior painter’s caulk. Keeping in mind that the bottom four inches is where the bats will land and enter the house, attach the front to the furring strips in the same way. Apply a bead of caulk to the top and screw on the roof, keeping one edge flush with the back.

Next, put a small piece of asphalt shingle or metal roofing on top – this will greatly extend the life of your bat house. In the Northeast, where summers are cooler than in other parts of the country, three coats of exterior grade black paint will help keep the house warm enough for the bats.

Carefully consider where you place your bat house. Full sun is a must, so don’t put it in a tree or under the eaves of a building. Bats don’t like lights, and they don’t like noise from air conditioners and air vents. They need a good water source close to their box; ponds are great, but a kiddie pool will work. Make sure reflective objects aren’t lighting up their box from below, and monitor for hornet infestations; hornets will cause bats to leave the house immediately.

Finally, be ready to welcome your good neighbors back in the spring with a clean and sturdy home.

Like so many cycles in the natural world, patterns of winter raptor invasions are driven by the same things that drive much of our daily lives: sex and food. Okay, mostly food, but reproductive success plays a role for some species. There are five species of arctic and boreal raptors that periodically “irrupt” south into the northern United States: rough-legged hawk, snowy owl, great grey owl, northern hawk owl, and boreal owl. As predators, all of these species are dependent, to varying degrees, upon small mammals (particularly voles and lemmings) as a critical food source. The largest and most powerful of these birds is the snowy owl, a generalist predator of the arctic tundra capable of taking advantage of a wide variety of prey, ranging from small mammals to arctic ground squirrels, hares, ptarmigan, and other birds. At the other end of the spectrum is the tiny boreal owl, which, as its name implies, occupies the boreal forest zone and specializes in preying on small mammals, primarily the red-backed vole.

Across the North American tundra (generally north of 60 degrees north latitude), arctic raptor populations ebb and flow along with the abundance of lemmings, which fluctuate synchronously on a regular cycle. When lemming numbers are high, raptors such as the snowy owl have more prey to feed their young, resulting in years of high reproductive success. For this generalist predator, southward irruptions often follow these years of high nesting success, not because food in the arctic is scarce, but because snowy owl populations (and those of other predators that feed on lemmings) are extremely high. For snowy owls, the result is that many young owls migrate south into southern Canada and the northern United States, thereby avoiding competition with the more aggressive adult birds, most of which remain in the Arctic.

Among specialist owls, however, southward irruptions are primarily linked to years of low small-mammal populations, particularly the red-backed vole, which undergoes a three- to five-year population cycle. Recent work done by Marianne Cheveau of the University of Quebec, along with several colleagues, demonstrated that large numbers of boreal owls move south every four years when red-backed vole densities are at their lowest. The other two owl species (northern hawk owl and great grey owl) show the same four-year irruptive cycle, but they are less pronounced because both species are larger and occupy a variety of habitats, allowing them to prey on a broader range of species.

The most reliable winter raptor visitor from the north is the rough-legged hawk. A nomadic species that nests in the arctic tundra of Alaska and Canada, rough-legged hawks are migratory, moving south each year to winter in open habitats in southern Canada and the northern United States. It is unclear why, as a migrant to our region every year, this species occasionally exhibits “irruption” years. Intuitively, you would expect these invasions to correspond to years of high reproductive success, like the snowy owl, when there are simply more birds around. But the pattern appears to be more complex, fluctuating regionally across the wintering range, with “invasions” occurring in areas where small rodent prey are abundant. This has led some to theorize that rough-leggeds, like European kestrels (and probably many other hawks), can visually detect areas where rodents are abundant by seeing their scent markings, which are visible in the ultraviolet spectrum that many birds are sensitive to.

The best places to look for these wintering birds of prey are areas of extensive open habitats, reminiscent of their arctic tundra breeding grounds. In Vermont, the fertile agricultural lands of the Champlain Valley, especially around Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area in Addison, provide the most consistent sightings of rough-legged hawks and snowy owls, while in New Hampshire, open marshes and beaches along the seacoast produce reliable results. But, keep in mind that during invasion years, sightings can and do occur almost anywhere across the twin states, and Boston’s Logan Airport is a well-known hotbed for wintering raptors from the far north.

The Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas, carried out every 25 years, is a population survey that aims to map the distribution of all of the breeding birds in the state. Using a grid system of 5-kilometer blocks, about 350 volunteers documented the species that breed in 365 randomly selected areas. By comparing this year’s results to those of the first atlas, which was conducted in the 1970s, trends emerge that are used by state and private land protection agencies to prioritize conservation activities. The next atlas will be conducted in the 2030s.

“Grassland and shrubland birds are declining just about everywhere, partly because forests are maturing,” said Rosalind Renfrew, a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, which conducted the survey. “Even though some may not have been a major part of our landscape in the past, I believe that we should do our best to manage for these species where they now breed.”

The distribution of forest birds, on the other hand, appears to be stable, thanks to the same forest maturation. “The birds that need large blocks of forest habitat are holding their own,” Renfrew said. “As a group, forest interior species appear to be stable in their distribution. The number of species that gained blocks and those that lost blocks were more or less equal.”

Canada warbler is one species that experienced a sharp decline, having been found in one-third fewer blocks than it occupied during the first atlas. Whippoorwill, a bird that needs early successional habitat, also declined precipitously, and may be proposed for the state’s threatened list. Wood thrush declined, too, but only from the Northeast Kingdom. “It’s still a common species, but they’ve been declining in various parts of their range,” Renfrew said. “It might be that they’re disappearing from the more marginal habitat up there.”

Renfrew said that some boreal species experienced notable declines, including rusty blackbird (26 percent), olive-sided flycatcher (45 percent), Lincoln’s sparrow (30 percent), and boreal chickadee (73 percent). Vermont is at the southern edge of the breeding range of these species.

On the plus side, the atlas noted the first record of red crossbill breeding in Vermont, and barred owls were found in 34 more blocks than in the previous atlas, a 36 percent increase. Renfrew said that the owl may have benefited from the maturation of the forest, which may be providing it with more nesting cavities. Confounding that speculation, however, is the finding that northern saw-whet owl and eastern screech owl did not experience similar increases.

Other species that were documented breeding in Vermont for the first time include the great egret, sandhill crane, greater black-backed gull, Caspian tern, and fish crow.

“If I give the same stress, in the same fashion, to two genetically identical trees, then they should behave the same, unless they have some sort of environmental memory of where they had been previously,” Campbell said. “It’s like identical twins growing up in two different places: they can have a different chance of getting a disease because they have each had different environmental influences in their lifetimes.”

To test this hypothesis, Campbell acquired genetically identical poplar trees that had been raised in Saskatchewan and Alberta – locations with different climates – and grew stem cuttings from them side by side in a controlled growth room. Half were subjected to drought conditions and half were well watered. Indeed, the researcher found that the plants responded very differently, depending on their place of origin.

“If you walked into the lab, all the trees looked about the same,” said Campbell. “The changes were found at the genetic level.” He found no evidence that a gene mutation was responsible for the different responses the trees exhibited. Rather, he said the trees that had been obtained from Alberta used a different set of genes to respond to drought than the ones that had come from Saskatchewan.

The differences were most pronounced among those specimens that had been separated from a common environment the longest. “Those that had been separated by 15 years did the same thing, regardless of where they came from,” explained Campbell. “Those separated longer started to show differences related to where we sourced the material.”

Based on these findings, gardeners and foresters should pay particular attention to identifying the source of the trees and shrubs they purchase from nurseries, which may determine how the plants will grow and resist stress in the local area. In addition, a plant’s “memory” of its previous experiences could help determine its survival in the face of climate changes or other environmental stresses like diseases or pests.

We need to study how the plants we want to grow will contend with the significant environmental changes that are taking place,” Campbell said. “We don’t need to do that by genetic engineering, but instead by exposing plants to environmental conditions that make them more prepared for that stress.”

But garlic mustard, an aggressive invasive plant from Eurasia that occupies disturbed areas in its home range, suppresses plant growth by disrupting this beneficial relationship. And the invader’s expansion into forested communities in North America has raised concerns about the effect it will have in local woodlands. A series of studies conducted at the Harvard Forest by ecologist Kristina Stinson and her colleagues detected a decline in plant abundance as garlic mustard populations increased.

Like other members of the mustard family, garlic mustard produces oils and other chemicals that repel insects and fungi. In controlled experiments, Stinson found that in the presence of garlic mustard, seedlings of sugar maple, red maple, and white ash had significantly fewer mycorrhizal fungi on their roots and grew one-tenth as fast. She also demonstrated that seedling growth and fungal colonization were reduced when garlic mustard extracts were added to the soil.

When Stinson tested the seedlings of 16 other native plants, only the hardwood trees and shrubs were harmed. She said that this is probably because it is more beneficial to the invasive species to harm the woody plants with which it would compete for space.

In additional tests, she removed garlic mustard from forested plots and found that the negative effects on the fungi and on the growth of sugar maple and white ash remained strong for as long as two years. She wrote in a research paper that “it appears that the ‘legacy’ of garlic mustard lasts long after its removal, apparently through the longevity of the exuded chemicals.”

Stinson also found that garlic mustard can be toxic to mushrooms and some bacteria that play an important role in decomposition, and other researchers have found evidence that it can be toxic to the caterpillars of some butterflies that feed on native plants in the mustard family.

In its native Eurasia, garlic mustard coexists with plants and soil organisms that are apparently resistant to its toxins. Stinson has found some evidence that microbial communities are evolving in North America that may be more resistant to its effects.

Effective management of garlic mustard invasions requires a long-term commitment because the seeds can remain viable in the soil for more than five years. Hand pulling or cutting the flowering stems at ground level to prevent seed production is preferred. Researchers are studying potential biological control agents that may prove effective against large-scale infestations.

The cause of government wasn’t helped this week by a couple of whopper news stories that showed up in my inbox. This one from Maine, reports that the state spent millions of dollars to prop up the Old Town pulp mill while steadily fining the mill’s owner for ongoing pollution – which is sort of like giving your kid $10 to spend at the arcade, then promptly docking his allowance for spending time at the arcade.

This one reports that the federal government is fining motor fuel companies for not using biofuel in their gas and diesel mixes. The catch? The biofuel doesn’t exist. Oh, and they’re raising the biofuel quota in 2012. (In an interesting twist, the stories relate to each other: The Old Town mill is trying to produce biobutanol, a biofuel, in addition to the pulp and the excess electricity they create and sell on the New England grid.)

There’s plenty to pick on here, and it wouldn’t be surprising at all to have one of these stories make their way into a candidate’s stump speech as an example of government incompetence. But in spite of the simple answers and red meat sound bites coming off of the stump, and the cynical mood that makes us all really receptive to “they’re all a bunch of bums” logic, I find myself feeling sorry for government in these two stories. And I feel compelled to say: Yeah, but...

In the case of the Maine mills, we’re seeing perfectly predictable growing pains as a traditional, rural wood economy transforms itself into something else – and we don’t even know what the something else is yet. There’s no template for success when you take a shrinking (some would say dying) industry, throw in the fate of hundreds of mill workers, their families, their community, mix in the fact that a company has to profit to survive, add one aging, polluting biomass boiler and a site with a poor environmental track record, sprinkle with activists who promote the unarguable idea that clean air is good, add a University mandated with building a fuel that will revolutionize the world (oh, and we needed it last week), and then drop this unholy amalgamation on the desk of the Maine legislature and say: make me a delicious soufflé.

This is not to say our empathy should absolve government of responsibility for inefficiency, mismanagement, or incompetence. It’s just to say that after reading this news story, I didn’t want to shrug my shoulders condescendingly and say “there you go again, government,” I wanted to hear ideas about how government and taxpayer dollars can be wielded and allocated more efficiently. After all, government is just trying to give us what we want. We want jobs and economically healthy communities, so they’re propping up the mill. We want clean air, so they’re fining the mill as a means of trying to make it cleaner. Their convolutions reflect our own. I’d love to learn that the environmentalist quoted in the piece was concerned about the fate of the workers here, and had the vision to see what this facility could become as the biobutanol technology progresses; and I’d love to learn that the mill spokesman quoted in the piece had a long-term plan to replace that outdated boiler and a sense of environmental responsibility, because if this were the case, you’d be left with the sense that despite the speed bumps, we were at least on the way to finding a common ground (and more commonsensical) solution. You Mainers are more familiar with this story than I am, so please weigh in and tell us what you see.

As for the biofuel story, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see this as the intrusive hand of government unfairly messing with industry, and yes, it is unfair, and yes, those in charge ought to be asked to explain how something that’s patently unfair can be good policy. If I was the head of the National Petrochemicals Association, I’d be pissed too. But if we all agree that our fossil fuel addiction is a bad thing – and whether you’re an environmentalist concerned about carbon emissions or a defense hawk concerned about national security or a conservationist working to promote the working landscape and sustainably managed forests, we probably all agree that diversifying our energy portfolio is a good idea – there’s a great opportunity here to use local wood resources in a way that betters society. So how do up-and-coming biomass/pellet/cellulosic ethanol producers gain a foothold in a marketplace where fossil fuel production – i.e. the competition – is being subsidized by the government? If subsidizing a fuel source that doesn’t exist is as stupid as it sounds, what’s a smarter alternative considering this reality?

These are the question I’m interested in learning more about, in debating. And so my exasperation comes not from the headline, or in the government’s contortions, but in the fact that in this election season it’s hard to find an intelligent discussion that examines any issue in much depth.

But the price of this peace of mind turns out to be high when everything is counted. Rusted out cars, corroded bridges, weakened parking garages, contaminated wells and streams, and a lot of sick roadside vegetation are among the many costs of a safer ride.

The best news on the road salt front in this area is the increasing use of salt brine instead of dry salt. Gil Newbury of the Vermont Agency of Transportation compares it to the non-stick stuff you spray on a frying pan. Applied just before a storm begins, it keeps snow from sticking to the road, making it easy for plows to wing it off the roadbed. It’s estimated that up to one-third of the dry salt that leaves a spreader bounces right into the roadside ditch before doing any melting at all, whereas brine stays put. Like any salt, it becomes less effective as the temperature drops, but the addition of molasses – yes, molasses – makes the brine work when it’s nearly -4°F, while salt alone loses almost all of its melting power at around 15°F.

Fifty or so years of enthusiastic salt use has taught us a lot, and vehicles and highways are now built to resist salt, at least to some extent. Cars are made of more rust-resistant materials, reinforcing in concrete bridge decks is epoxy coated, and there are better paints for steel bridges. Though woody roadside vegetation cannot be modified so simply, it turns out that some species have considerably more resistance to salt than others. (Black ash, cottonwood, tamarack, northern red oak, balsam poplar, gray dogwood, staghorn sumac, choke cherry, and serviceberry are all highly tolerant.)

Unfortunately, this list does not include many of our most common trees; sugar maple, beech, and white pine are among the worst choices for salty roadsides. And, alas, some of those aggressive non-native species that we love to hate do rather well in brine: non-native honeysuckles, autumn olive, common buckthorn, and Norway maple.

Salt enters trees and shrubs either by being splashed onto the above-ground parts or by way of the roots. Curiously, plants that resist salt at one entry point may be highly vulnerable at the other. Northern red oak is a champ at keeping soil-borne salt out, but the leaves of seaside oaks splashed with salt spray by hurricanes turn brown within a few days.

In solution, salt separates into sodium and chloride ions and it’s the chloride ones that cause more damage to plants at the cellular level. Salt tolerance is based more on a plant’s ability to exclude chloride than on any intrinsic ability to tolerate it. Severely damaged plants may have chloride levels of 1.25 to 2 percent. Tolerant species growing under the same conditions will have levels of 0.5 to 0.9 percent.

Though sodium ions enter plant tissues more slowly, they are the major culprits in soil compaction – yet another method that salt uses to kill vegetation. Sodium ions change the way that soil particles aggregate, leading to a loss of normal spatial distribution. Severely compacted soil restricts access to water and oxygen, and the symptoms resemble those caused by drought. Plus, sodium travels along the same shuttle system as potassium and magnesium – both essential to making chlorophyll – and if excess sodium messes up the system, potassium deficiency results.

The amount of salt used to melt last winter’s near-record 122.8 inches of snow on state roads in Vermont was 37 percent less than in the similarly snowy winter of 2000-2001. Plus, last year, the state used almost no sand, which meant almost no hydrocarbon-soaked sand clogs in our stream beds. New Hampshire, too, is dissolving salt before applying it to the road. From a tree’s perspective, this trend is overwhelmingly positive.

Road salt in some form is here to stay, at least until global warming takes a giant leap forward. There’s no future in asking drivers to slow down, stay home, or risk sliding into each other just in order to keep white pines from turning brown. Although the harm to the environment does keep building decade after decade, we’re pretty much stuck with trying to slow the rate of increase in the damage inflicted.

In the past 50 years, we’ve learned a lot about the science of rivers. We’ve learned that rivers are a balanced natural system controlled by the laws of nature and they behave as they do because of the well-understood principles of gravity, force, energy, and friction. Those principles control the hydrological behavior of a river; a river has no choice in the matter. The laws of nature are in charge and they cannot be repealed.

Encroaching physically on our rivers interferes with their natural dynamics and changes how they weather a flood. We cause rivers to rise faster when we construct impermeable surfaces. Human alterations, such as straightening a river, filling wetlands, removing gravel, creating pinch points at undersized bridges and culverts, removing the natural plants from riparian zones and replacing them with riprap, and shutting off a river from its floodplain with berms, roadways, and train tracks, increase the power of rivers, and contribute to floods that destroy property and infrastructure.

We will not stop flooding by making the riprap stone larger, removing more of or even all of the gravel, constructing higher berms, or making rivers arrow-straight from source to confluence with a larger body of water. The laws of nature will not allow those approaches to be successful.

What will lessen flooding damage is allowing rivers to access their floodplains and wetlands where the river water can spread out and slow down; allowing riparian zones to flourish on the banks of rivers; allowing rivers to meander so the meanders can absorb the force of flood flows; allowing rivers to naturally deposit gravel where gravity pulls it out of the water column to achieve river stability (as rivers have done for millennia), and, despite initial added costs, sizing culverts and bridges to allow unrestricted flows at flood stage.

When a river floods, it expands its floodplains, increases meander, and creates wider channels to absorb flow within the banks. This is nature’s way of setting the stage for less flooding the next time around. What we are doing in many of our rivers right now, even in places where no infrastructure is threatened, is taking away those adjustments that the river made for itself, increasing the odds that the next high-water event will cause even more damage to the things – houses, property, roadways – we’re trying to protect.

If we are working in a river to repair our infrastructure, we need to make sure we really need to be there, and once those repairs are made, we should be thoughtful about making any further changes. All work, but especially any unnecessary work in our rivers, extracts a terrible price from the life in a river.

High water naturally scours a river and is hard on aquatic species, but the work going on now continues to unsettle the rivers, slowing the recovery process. Heavy equipment in a river at normal flows causes sediment releases that rivers cannot handle. At high flows, rivers move large amounts of sediment, but when the water level recedes, the sediment drops out of the water column at appropriate places based on the mass of individual particles and the force left in the water flow. Sediment released at low flows deposits fine-grained sediment in the wrong places, clogging the open cobble and gravel on the bottom and choking off the under-stone habitat invertebrate life needs.

Additionally, continued exposure to high sediment loads can injure fish gills and make it hard for fish to see and feed.

Because we’re dealing with centuries-old settlement patterns, there will certainly be cases where there’s no way around fighting the rivers. But it’s imperative that as we rebuild from Irene and Lee we don’t make the same mistakes all over again. We should not force rivers into unnatural configurations as a response to flooding – we already know that won’t work. The informed choices we make today will protect property in the future.

To escape an icy demise, insects in northern latitudes employ many tactics for winter survival, such as overwintering as freeze-resistant eggs, or fortifying their bodies with natural antifreezes and hiding in protected crevices. 

Not so the honeybee, a familiar, non-native insect that made its way to the Americas via settlers in 1622. Honeybees are native to Africa, and adhering to their warm-latitude origins, remain active all winter. Individually, they’d stand no chance against months of subfreezing weather, but as a collective, they’ve developed several extraordinary ways to survive in cold northern climes. 

In the Northeast, a honeybee’s preparation for winter begins with the first flowers of spring, but this process accelerates as summer wanes. The collection of fall nectar, most notably from goldenrods and asters, can be essential to the colony’s winter survival.  The average hive may need 60 or more pounds of honey to get through a northern winter.

Another crucial late-summer process is the production of winter bees, bees with a different blood protein profile and greater body fat than their summer bee counterparts. The winter bees get the colony through winter, while the summer bees, the ones that so diligently foraged for nectar and nursed the developing winter bees, die off in the fall. Beginning in September, the colony also rids itself of drones, male bees whose only role is to mate with new queen bees. All drones are forced out to starve. Lastly, the colony stops producing new bees, as eggs and larvae require temperatures of 90oF to 96oF to develop.

As flowers disappear and temperatures fall, bees stop foraging and remain in the hive. When the mercury falls below 64oF, bees begin a behavior known as clustering, where they gather together to form a ball that extends through several honeycombs in a typical hive. The cluster consists of an outer mantle of tightly-packed bees which surrounds an inner core of bees that are more loosely-packed and free to move about. The all-important queen bee is sequestered at the center.

As the temperature drops, the cluster becomes tighter and tighter, shrinking to one-fifth of its original size. At their most tightly-packed, the mantle bees form a layer that approaches fur in its insulating qualities. Bees become comatose if they chill below 43oF; thus, when their thorax temperature falls to about 54oF, the mantle bees exchange places with bees from the core. Mantle bees that get too chilled to return to the core drop off and die.

Once the temperature in the hive falls below 50oF, the cluster can only maintain its life-supporting interior temperature of 64 oF (at the periphery) to 90oF (center) by actively producing heat. Like mammals, the core bees begin to shiver by pumping their large flight muscles. This is why honey stores are critical. The bees eat honey and transform it into heat through metabolism. After they empty one honeycomb, the cluster slowly shifts sideways and upwards towards a full one.

This survival mode, however, has some inherent hazards. If there is not enough honey, or if it gets so cold that the bees cannot move to full honeycombs, the colony starves.

Eating honey, especially if it is high in indigestible material, leads to a need to void feces. Usually, this is taken care of when winter days warm above 50oF, allowing bees to leave the hive for cleansing flights during which they dot the snow with tiny yellow splashes. If prolonged cold stops bees from leaving the hive, they eventually defecate inside, and if enough bees do this, it leads to the death of the entire colony.

To make matters worse, metabolism produces water vapor as a byproduct, and this must be allowed to escape from the hive. Savvy beekeepers drill a hole near the top of the hive for this purpose. Otherwise, the vapor condenses and ice-cold water drips onto the bees, causing them to freeze to death.  In the particularly bad and long winter of 2000-2001, many beekeepers in the northeast reported losses of 50 percent of their colonies. Some suffered losses of 90 percent.

One of nature’s marvels is the temperature achieved within a mere ball of bees in subzero weather. So take off your winter hat and put your ear to the thin wood of a hive; you’ll hear the humming of bees by the thousand. The sound is enough to transport you to summer meadows, even in the cold, dark depths of winter.

She’s asked me for advice on what used stove to buy, and like most men, I have plenty of opinions to offer on the subject.

For instance, I think that it’s perfectly acceptable to buy an old, dependable, dirty stove (dirty meaning it was made before states began mandating that new woodstoves include emissions control) if money’s an issue. But as nice as some of them are, if you have any environmental conscience, such a stove should probably just get you through a winter or two and shouldn’t be a permanent solution to your home heating needs any more than a gas-guzzling 1973 Chevy Caprice station wagon should be the car you commute to work in every day.

Of all the old pre-EPA stoves I’ve known in my life, the Fisher that we have up in deer camp is by far my favorite. It takes enormous wood, which is really nice. And it has these great front dampers that just bombard the fire with oxygen. It goes from 0-60 in no time at all, which I guess makes it more of a Corvette than a Caprice. And once the fire’s where you need it, you can damp it down to nothing in no time – it’s like a thermostat. Man, I love that stove.

As far as the new EPA-approved stoves go, I don’t like the catalytic ones. (For those of you who don’t know, catalytic stoves were the first generation of clean-burning stoves to hit the market; they feature a catalytic converter that has to be engaged when the stove gets up to a certain temperature. The converters have to be replaced on a somewhat regular basis, which is an expensive hassle).

The catalytic stove I have in my life – a Vermont Castings Defiant that sits in the Northern Woodlands office – just doesn’t burn that well with the converter engaged. And I never know whether the converter should be bypassed at night when you damp the fire down and drop the stove temperature, which if you do, sort of defeats the point of having it, and if you don’t, means you’re running it too cool, a supposed no-no.

Far better, I think, to go with the more modern stoves that send the smoke along an internal hot corridor where any unburned components are ignited and consumed. The one I have in my home is a Vermont Castings Aspen, which is a fine stove except that it’s hard to get started and it’s too small. My house is only 600 square feet, so when it’s going it throws sufficient heat. It’s just that it’s a real pain to cut 12- and 14-inch wood, and to empty an ash pan every morning, and to have to play Tetris to fit your wood into the firebox, and to use a lot of kindling in the fall and spring because you don’t have a sufficient coal bed. I think that wood size is one of the key things new stove owners overlook, especially those who plan to cut their own wood. Go big. Your back will thank you.

But all of this is one man’s opinion. I’m positive that our readers have their own experiences and can improve the quality of information here. So what’s your take? What do you think of your stove? What are your thoughts on wood stoves in general? What advice can you give someone looking to buy a used woodstove?

Fear not. There is a way to apply this sleek, urban looking thing to your favorite rural pastimes. Today’s mobile handheld devices support field guide applications (commonly called “apps”) that you can download and use in field or forest. And it’s not just field guides going digital: fly-fishing apps provide videos on how to tie a fly, duck hunting apps help you train your retriever, and birding apps play songs to help you differentiate those mind-boggling warbler calls.

So what the heck is an app, and where do you get them? Apps are specialized computer programs, designed for handheld devices such as Apple’s iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, Google’s Android, and HP’s TouchPad. Apps are purchased online (though some are free) and downloaded onto your device of choice. Once downloaded, most do not require internet access to run.

Leafsnap is a tree-identification app developed by a couple of professors and a Smithsonian botanist using face recognition software. It features a collection of high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, and fruits. It is free and allows users to set up personal accounts to load their images and track their findings. Just point the device at the leaf you want identified, snap a picture, and the app will tell you what kind of tree it is (though you will have to be in range of wireless internet or have a data plan on your phone).

David Jacobs, one of Leafsnap’s creators and a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, said there are “big advantages” to using this app over a traditional tree field guide.

“The automatic recognition allows a user to take a picture of an isolated leaf and find matching species,” Jacobs explained. “If the instructions are carefully followed, this does a good job of finding matches for a leaf.”

Leafsnap currently includes three regions – New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Northeast. Most northeastern trees are currently available on the app, and any missing species will be included by spring, Jacobs said.

The National Audubon Society’s Audubon Guides have an extensive list of mobile field guides, ranging from apps for wildflowers of the southwest desert to mammals of North America. Charlie Rattigan, executive vice president of Green Mountain Digital, and creator of Audubon apps, said the digital guides offer more than a book can.

“These are not simply ebooks,” Rattigan said. “The bird guide, for instance, includes over eight hours of songs and calls and wintering range maps for all migratory species.” Green Mountain Digital also created a fly-fishing app for the sporting goods company Orvis, which includes instructional video of casting techniques, a library of flies, and 3D animation showing how to tie 22 different fly fishing knots.

Other apps that might be interesting to our readers include a Ducks Unlimited app, which features a waterfowl gallery and videos of duck hunting techniques and duck calls, and “Critter Trax,” an app that identifies tracks and scat.

Most field guide apps cost between $1 and $20, some are free.

When Europeans first arrived in the New World, mourning doves probably existed only in scattered locations throughout North America. But that would change. As the settlers modified the land to suit their needs, they ended up suiting the mourning doves’ needs as well. Both humans and doves like open and semi-open habitats: neighborhoods, parks, open woods, grasslands, and farms.

Today, the mourning dove holds the distinction of being the only native North American bird to breed in every state, including Hawaii. Their U.S. population is estimated at more than 400 million. Despite their numbers, their lives tend to be short and difficult. In any given year, more than half of the adults and two thirds of first-year birds will die. Nationwide, hunters take more than two million birds annually, though the mourning dove is not a legal game bird in Vermont or New Hampshire. Around here, predators and bad weather are the limiting factors.

While observing the birds, it is possible to tell the difference between males and females, although the difference is subtle. Males are a little larger, their breasts are rosier, and their heads are a more iridescent and brighter blue-gray. If you’re watching a nest, note that males do most of the incubating from mid-morning to mid-afternoon, while females typically take to the nest in the early morning, evening, and night.

As is the case with most members of the dove family, females lay two eggs. Both male and female provide their hatchlings crop milk, a rich mixture of cells sloughed off from the crop wall. Crop milk is the consistency of cottage cheese, and is extremely nutritious, having more protein and fat than mammalian milk. On crop milk, the young grow quickly fledging in about 14 days. But what may be more interesting than what is fed to hatchlings is how dove hatchlings eat. Instead of mom and dad placing food into the hatchlings’ gaping mouths, the opposite happens. Parents open their beaks, and babies stick their heads into the open mouths to consume food right from the parent’s crop. Young doves feed this way on both crop milk and seed. In the Northeast, mourning doves may raise up to three broods a year, although two is more common.

While mourning doves are common at the bird feeder all year round, the doves you see in winter are not the same as the ones you see in summer. Mourning dove’s migration is a complicated affair called “differential” migration and is related to a bird’s age and sex. They begin to move south to the mid-Atlantic and southern states in late August and early September. The young leave first, then the females, and finally the males. Some birds, most of them males, don’t migrate at all but remain in the north. If you look closely at the mourning doves at your winter feeders, you will find that they are predominantly males. It’s worth it to these males to brave bad weather and frostbitten toes to get a head start on establishing a good breeding territory early in the spring.

If you’ve ever startled a mourning dove, you undoubtedly caused it to blast off into the air from its perch, making a whistling sound as it goes. This high-pitched whistle – sometimes called a whinny – does not emanate from the bird’s syrinx; rather, the high-pitched noise comes from the bird’s powerful wings. It is believed that the whistling is a built-in alarm system, warning others that danger may be near, while simultaneously startling a would-be predator (and giving the dove the precious seconds it needs to make its escape).

The more I learn and the more I look, the more I see that the common mourning dove is not so common at all. This winter I’ll be watching them very closely; there may yet be more secrets to learn.

“The rhythms that drums produce connect us to each other, and the act of making the drum connects us to the earth – to the wood, to the animal it’s made from. Most hunters take great satisfaction in using every part of the animal they harvest. In this case, the drum becomes another form of reverence. While it may sound wishful to some, I think some of that reverence comes back out when you play the drum.”

We were convinced, and so we asked him to walk us through the steps in the process. Harwood credits his shamanism teacher, Everley St. Peter, and the online tutorials at PaleoPlanet as the sources of his knowledge.

Step 1

Remove the hide from the deer (the quicker you do this, the easier it will be). Once removed, scrape off all the meat and fat. You can use a commercial fleshing knife, which has a sharp edge for cutting and a dull edge for pushing, or make do with a sharp knife and a blunt object, like a tablespoon or a piece of slate. It’s important to get all the flesh off, though you needn’t fuss about removing every last bit of membrane.

Step 2

Prepare a de-hairing soak by adding wood ash or hydrated lime (calcium hydroxide) to 10-15 gallons of water. You can buy lime at any masonry supply store. Add one cup of lime for every gallon of water. (And wear gloves when you’re handling the lime.) Mix well and add the fleshed hide. Cover it with rocks or firewood so it is completely submerged. Let it sit for one week.

Step 3

Remove the hide from the tub. If it’s ready, the hair should pull out in clumps. If not, add more lime and soak some more (it’s hard to overdo it). Using a scraper, remove all the hair. When finished, turn the hide over and remove any stray bits of flesh you might have missed in the fleshing process. Then neutralize the lime by rinsing the hide in running water for two days or by soaking for eight hours in a baking soda solution. (Use two cups of baking soda for every five gallons of water.)

Step 4

Drape the hide over the drum form. For this particular drum, Harwood used a commercial cedar form, but it’s easy enough to make your own – just get a cedar or poplar butt that is rotten, set it up on some sawhorses with a nylon canoe strap to hold the butt in place, then bore out the rotten center with a chainsaw or a gouge and mallet and finish things off on the inside with a spoke shave. As you trim the hide to fit over your drum form, oversize it by a couple inches. Punch holes in the hide evenly around the drum (be sure to punch with a leather punch or a rounded-off nail, as a knife hole will tear), about ½ inch from the edge. Cut a piece of lacing that’s at least 20 times the diameter of the drum frame. String the lacing in the pattern shown here. Begin at hole 1, then go to hole 10, then to hole 2, then hole 11, and so on, all the while pulling the string tight to secure a snug fit. Continue until the entire hide is laced, then tie the two ends together.

Step 5

Using extra lacing, create a handle and tensioner in the center of the drum. Here, Harwood used 550 paracord (“It’s non-traditional, but effective”). “This is a 17-hole drumhead,” said Harwood, “so I base my weave around three groups of 4 and one group of 5.” The weave pulls everything even tighter, and gives a good hand grip.

Step 6

Finish things off by creating a mallet, or beater. This one’s a pin cherry branch, wrapped in tanned deer hide. The mallet head is full of clean deer fur.

Ask any young child to draw a Christmas tree and chances are he’ll draw something close to a triangle. If the kid is particularly talented, she’ll draw a cone. Indeed, the cone-shaped tree is as traditional as the holiday itself. Sure, there are Charlie Browns among us who will settle for a less-than-perfect Christmas tree. But most of us look for a fir or spruce with just the right taper, symmetry, and conical form.

That conical shape is certainly the norm at most Christmas tree farms, and the short explanation for it is that the tree farmer shears the trees to look that way. But even if you’re wandering afield in search of a wild Christmas tree, far from any shears or knives, you’ll still find plenty of classic cone-shaped specimens out there. In winter, these conical evergreens stand out against the more rounded and leafless birches, beech, and maple.

Why is your Christmas tree conical (though your spouse might say comical)? Like so many of nature’s designs, trees – including spruce and fir – take shape according to a system. Their branches don’t grow randomly in various directions. Rather, there’s an intriguing pattern to this story. It’s a story of dominance and control – not exactly traditional holiday themes, I’ll grant you, but a good story nevertheless.

Look at your Christmas tree. At its top is one vertical shoot that should be longer than all the other shoots around it. This shoot is called the leader, and it exerts control over all the shoots below it. This mechanism has evolved, presumably, to ensure that the tree’s main thrust is upward toward its source of energy, the sun. That it makes an excellent stem upon which to place a star is just a bonus.

Almost all trees begin their life this way. However, while a cone shape is retained in conifers, it is soon lost in most hardwoods as the tree grows and the single, central stem gives way to lateral branches that often grow at least as fast as the leader.

In spruce and fir, the leader outgrows the lateral branches below it, resulting in a conical and a well-defined central trunk. The leader exercises its dominance with help from a hormone called auxin in the top bud, which inhibits the elongation of the shoots below it. They still grow, but not as fast as the leader. The pattern goes like this: in any given year, increases in length are greatest at the top of the tree, and these increases diminish downward and inward toward the bottom. The reason the lower branches are longer is that they are older. They’ve had more years to add growth. But in any given year, they don’t grow as much as the upper branches. Thus, the tree takes a conical form and maintains it indefinitely.

Or at least until the leader’s dominance is interrupted.

This occurs, for example, if an insect destroys the bud at the top of the leader. In such cases, the lateral shoots just below the leader – newly freed from its control – resume growth at their full potential, vying to outpace each other in a race for dominance. The fastest growing of them becomes the new leader, and dispatches its hormones to suppress the others. The result is a crooked stem, as seen in so many white pines whose leaders have been killed by the white pine weevil.

There is an interesting irony to this story of conics, though. Although the dominant-leader phenomenon results in the conical shape sought after in Christmas trees, Christmas tree growers actually try to overcome it by shearing. Without shearing, the tree does take on a nice conical shape, but an unsheared tree is very open. That is, it tends to be airy and not very dense. Shearing, on the other hand, stimulates the opening of many buds lying dormant along the branches, and encourages the shoots within them to elongate. This results in a fuller, denser tree.

May all your Christmas trees be just the way you want them.

But the further out we expand from our own experiences and our own little slice of earth, the more unclear things become. I don’t know for sure about the forest health across town, let alone statewide or regionally. Or what animal populations are up and what’s down where you live. This uncertainty makes our magazine and our community of readers valuable, as we can talk to each other about these things, share anecdotes, broaden each other’s perspectives. But at the same time, this uncertainty can make big picture public policy discussions about environmental/conservation issues seem baffling and very far away.

I attended a public policy meeting recently in Vermont, where foresters were appalled by the deer damage they were seeing on their woodlots and hunters were appalled by the lack of deer they were seeing in the woods. One group wanted less deer, the other more, and they were letting government officials know it. That same afternoon, I had lunch with a dairy farmer, and when I told her I was worried about the declining number of dairy farms in Vermont, she responded by pointing out that where once Joe Farmer had five boys who went on to own five farms, today, one big farm supports six families, they make better money than they used to, and each family gets to take a vacation. Her feeling was that her dairy was doing just fine, thank you very much. That very same evening, I read an editorial in Northern Logger magazine where loggers in western New York were saying there’s too much competition and overcapacity was flooding the market with logs and driving down prices, while mill owners were complaining that there’s not enough loggers out there and they were being forced to pay too much for a limited supply of wood.

So who knows, right? Everything is relative to everyone’s individual reality, and often times, contradicting narratives can be equally true. The whole thing makes me empathize with the people – the politicians, the entrepreneurs, the men and women who sit on these think tanks – who are charged with steering public policy. It makes me wonder how they deal with being intellectually whiplashed everyday by opposing viewpoints that can be equally valid. Imagine being in charge of a state’s deer herd and having to perpetually find a compromise that won’t make anyone happy? Or being charged with coming up with solutions to buoy a forest products industry that doesn’t look the same from one state to the next, or one town to the next, or one person to the next.

There’s no epiphany here, just an observation.

These northern visitors make cold-weather birding interesting, but one bird – the northern shrike – stands out because of its unusual hunting habits. The bird’s Latin name, Lanius excubitor (“watchful butcher”), gives some clue as to what comes next, but we’ll get to the gory details in a moment.

The shrike is an attractive bird, with grey on its head and back, a white chest and throat, black patches on its wings and tail, and a black mask-like band across its eyes. From a distance, you might mistake it for a blue jay.

But what makes the shrike notable is the fact that it’s a predatory songbird. Like hawks and owls, it hunts and kills for a living. But unlike most hawks and owls, the shrike is small – about the size of a robin – and unlike the raptors, it kills not with its talons, but with its sharp, notched beak.

The shrike hunts by perching atop a tall shrub or tree at the edge of a field where it surveys the surrounding area for songbirds, insects, and small mammals. From its high perch, it watches and listens for movement. When it sees or hears prey, it swoops down and uses its strong, hooked bill to dispatch its meal.

Chip Darmstadt, director of the North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, Vermont, notes that the shrike’s bill is adapted to kill quickly and precisely. It is equipped with a tomial tooth – a small triangular projection on the beak’s upper mandible that helps shrikes surgically sever the prey animal’s spinal cord with a single well-aimed bite. The only other birds whose beaks feature a tomial tooth are falcons. This time of year you might watch a shrike swoop down from a treetop perch, land in the snow, and with a single movement of its head, grab and kill a hidden vole.

The northern shrike probably evolved this hunting technique on its far-northern breeding ground. It nests and breeds near the Arctic, on the natural edge between boreal forest and open tundra. There too, it habitually perches high atop a prominent tree or bush, scanning the tundra for prey. Its nest is a bulky cup of twigs and roots, woven together with feathers and hair. And it is so deep that when the female shrike is incubating, she is usually completely out of sight except for the tip of her long tail.

Northern shrikes migrate south in the winter to the northern U. S. and southern Canada. In some winters, they are more plentiful here than others, possibly because of fluctuations in the number of voles and small birds wintering on their home range, year-to-year.

The bird’s folk name is the “butcher bird,” and we don’t know which came first, the folk name or the butcher reference in the Latin name. But both names reflect the fact that if prey is available, the shrike will kill more than it can immediately use. It stores the extra meat, often skewering the tiny corpse so that it hangs, butcher fashion, from a thorn or a fence wire. Darmstadt has watched a northern shrike tear a mouse into chunks of meat and systematically hide them in the crotches of a small tree.

Earlier observers, noting that the shrike sometimes kills more than it immediately needs, termed the bird “bloodthirsty.” But the behavior is actually a form of caching, a precaution against times of lean hunting. The skewering serves a practical purpose, as well. A shrike’s small feet don’t allow it to properly grip large prey while it feeds, and so it impales its food to hold it in place while eating.

In all its actions, the shrike is a charismatic bird that exudes a fierce energy, even when perched watchfully atop a tree or bush at the edge of a clearing. Hunting, they often pursue smaller birds closely and intently, twisting and turning through the air like a fighter pilot.

Shrikes have what scientists call “site fidelity” – that is, they may regularly return to hunt from the same location, even the same field or treetop, winter after winter. Consequently, birders hoping to see one should regularly check out known shrike haunts and likely-looking open fields, edged by trees. Habitually scanning treetops, utility wires, and other high perches on the edge of pastures, marshes, or other wild clearings can be fruitful. Watch for a flash of white patches on gray wings as the shrike shoots across a clearing, then dramatically stalls and swoops up, landing lightly on its high perch. Once seen, the bird’s grace and power are unmistakable.

Tree cavities provide essential habitat for a variety of wildlife, from birds and mammals to insects, reptiles, and even amphibians.There’s good reason for this, of course. Cavities provide excellent protection from harsh weather and temperature extremes, they are relatively safe from predators, and they can be used for multiple years with little or no maintenance.As you might imagine, competition among the dozens of species that use tree cavities can be quite fierce, with more aggressive species often evicting the smaller or more timid ones, while occasionally two species will share a single cavity.

Aside from the day-to-day drama of eviction notices and cohabitation, cavity users fall into one of two basic groups: builders or squatters.Most of the builders, known as primary cavity nesters, are woodpeckers,while chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches can only excavate cavities in wood that has been softened by decay.The squatters, on the other hand (also called secondary cavity users), include a variety of other birds, small- to medium-size mammals, some snakes, tree frogs, and insects, all of which depend on cavities but are incapable of excavating them.Primary cavity nesters provide a critical function for secondary cavity users.Moreover, studies have shown that there is a significant relationship between the abundance of primary and secondary cavity-nesting birds, such that declines in the former lead to declines in the latter.

In Vermont and New Hampshire, we may be seeing an example of this relationship among three cavity nesting birds associated with open woodlands, forest edges, old fields, and agricultural areas.The American kestrel, eastern screech owl, and northern flicker are all showing long-term population declines.While there may be many factors contributing to this, several studies indicate that the flicker is the primary cavity excavator for both kestrel and screech owl, so that a decline in flickers could limit nest site availability for the two birds of prey.

Kathy Martin, a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has been studying the ecology of cavity-nesting communities for many years.Along with her graduate students, Dr. Martin has found that both the northern flicker and pileated woodpecker are keystone species in forest communities – species that have a much greater impact on their community or ecosystem than would be expected based on their relative abundance.In the case of these two woodpeckers, it’s because they provide critical nesting and roosting habitat for such a wide range of species.Although there are nine woodpecker species that excavate cavities in British Columbia forests, most of the 32 species of secondary cavity users utilize holes made by northern flickers.And while pileated woodpeckers are much less abundant than flickers, they add to the cavity-nesting community by creating large, durable cavities that provide breeding and roosting sites for cavity-nesting ducks, raptors, and many mammals.In fact, both Barrow’s and common goldeneye ducks only use cavities excavated by pileated woodpeckers or those that occurred naturally.

Martin’s studies also revealed that excavators prefer quaking aspen over all other trees because of its susceptibility to heartwood rot, which provides a soft interior that is easily excavated, while the outer sapwood remains solid.In fact, within her study sites, aspen is considered to be a keystone species as well, because without it the cavity-dwelling community could fall apart.This has major implications for forest management in British Columbia.

In the Northeast, where forest communities have a greater diversity of tree species that share the cavity-friendly characteristics of aspen, including basswood and red maple, there is less reliance on a single tree species to provide the majority of cavities.So the next time you’re out for a walk in the woods, consider grabbing a walking stick and knocking on a few “doors.”You never know who might be home.

I saw the first oak seedling on our land four years ago, having seen zero in the previous 18 years of our ownership. Last year I noticed another one, and this year I’ve seen about 50 here and many more in the neighborhood. Their red leaves, two or four deep, are still hanging on and they’ve stood out, maybe more than usual in the warm, more or less snowless November we had. Being southern trees “they haven’t yet perfected the deciduous habit,” a phrase I read way back that sticks in my mind – unlike the name of its author.

Our neighborhood is not entirely oakless, but it’s close. Two high, rocky sidehills a couple of miles to the west of us each have a small patch of mature red oaks; their broad, brown-leaved crowns are visible from a long distance.

In the fall, blue jays eat and cache acorns and they are known to carry them in an expandable esophagus for 2.5 miles. The energy obtained from an acorn snack is used to transport the next nut – so both tree and bird win. Interestingly, jays can’t live on acorns alone as the high tannin content interferes with protein digestion. An acorn diet supplemented with acorn weevils, on the other hand, will sustain a jay and it’s been suggested that the weevils, usually considered to be bad for oaks, may instead benefit these trees because they make the acorns more palatable to jays, and not all acorns are infested. Jays are kind enough to bury the seeds, as well as to disperse them widely.

Red squirrels and many other animals are fond of acorns but none of them carry them any distance from the parent tree. Still, if it’s blue jays who are responsible for peppering the woods around here with little oaks, why did they wait until 2010? Someone’s going to say “global warming,” and, yes, I’m a believer, but, in the case of oaks, I’m a skeptic. Until someone has a better explanation,  I’m sticking with the acorn fairy.

On one shelf sits an orange, lopsided square-shaped crystal of xenotime that was collected in Bethlehem. Xenotime contains the rare earth element yttrium in its chemical structure. You can’t see the yttrium in the crystal any more than you can see the sodium in table salt, and even the crystal itself is hard to see. It’s 0.6 millimeters across, too small to be seen clearly without a magnifying glass. But the pink-orange rock collected nearby – about the width of a dime – is considered a massive example of its kind. It is fluocerite, which contains the rare earth element cerium.

Yttrium, cerium, and other rare earth elements are in the news. China’s got them. The United States needs them. The future is made of rare earth.

When I took Chemistry 101 in 1981, the professor waived off that stack of elements that broke the periodic table’s neat pattern of rows and columns. These “rare earth” elements were not for beginners. So he didn’t mention that samarium, a rare earth element, was responsible for the Sony Walkman, the iPod of its day. Super-powerful samarium magnets let Sony shrink a tape player down to the size of a small paperback book, light enough to stash in a backpack to listen to between classes.

Today, neodymium, gadolinium, dysprosium, and praseodymium magnets – all made from rare earth elements – have joined samarium magnets to make possible many of the high-tech gadgets we take for granted today. Prius motors, portable DVD players, iPhones, cell phones, laptops, fiber optic cables, wind turbine rotors, and surgical lasers all utilize rare earth elements.

Ninety percent of rare earth minerals are mined in China. The funny thing is, though, that rare earth elements are not rare. Cerium is the 25th most abundant element on Earth, nearly as common as lead. What makes rare earth elements difficult to come by is that they are generally not found in veins or lodes. To use the rare earth elements in those rocks from Bethlehem, for example, you would need to first separate the rare earth mineral-bearing crystals from the other material, then, using a chemical process, remove the rare earth elements from the mineral.

While it can’t compare to China or California, our domestic rare earth hot spot, New Hampshire contains an abundance of rare earth elements. At least 11 minerals that contain rare earth elements are found in the state. Bethlehem’s Grafton County and the region around Keene, New Hampshire, are both known among local mineral collectors as good places to look. But there is little chance that rare earth minerals will ever be mined commercially in New Hampshire, as they are present in such tiny quantities that it would be too time-consuming and expensive to extract them here.

While mining may be out of the question, New Hampshire has left its mark on the mining industry, as the technique used to purify rare earth minerals was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by chemist Charles James at the University of New Hampshire.

The situation could not be more different in Vermont, a reminder that while we may think of Vermont and New Hampshire as twin states, geologically, they are anything but.

For Ray Coish, professor of geosciences at Middlebury College, rare earth elements in Vermont’s rocks provide fingerprints that show him where those rocks were formed. In Vermont, rare earth elements are mere traces within minerals dominated by other elements, but by comparing the signature of the rare earth elements, the grand story of Vermont’s geologic history – with oceans ebbing and continents colliding – can be reconstructed.

For example, Coish says there are rocks in Vermont that bear the same signature of rare earth elements as rocks recently formed in volcanic eruptions under the ocean. The identical signatures tell us that the Vermont rocks were formed in volcanoes that erupted under a long-gone ocean 400 to 500 million years ago, even though they now sit on the state’s mountainsides.

Many of Coish’s students have chosen to study rare earth elements for their senior thesis. They search Vermont’s mountains for rocks they can analyze for traces of rare earth, likely toting more rare earth in the iPads and cell phones in their backpacks than they’ll ever find in their studies.

Where I’m from in southern Vermont, I still see plenty of loggers at landings, but I don’t often see or hear them in the wood utilization schemes that are widely debated in the local papers. Around here, biomass is still dominating headlines. One proposed plant in the town of Pownal is largely dead, though another, a combined energy, pellet, and greenhouse facility that’s being proposed in Fair Haven, may materialize.

The news stories covering these proposed plants have a detached air about them. The exclusively positive vision of the mill spokesman is juxtaposed with predictably negative screed from an anti-biomass activist. The mediating perspective is usually provided by someone from academia, who sort of looks right past the specifics of the local situation and makes broad, general nods to the vagaries of carbon accounting, or amorphous regional wood supply studies, or maybe the abundance of eucalyptus pulp in Australia – his or her point being that if you look at things from a global perspective everything is interconnected. In an academic sense, that’s true, but in both a figurative and practical sense it’s about 10,000 miles from life as it’s known in the local rural economy.

Of course the perspectives of all of these parties are more nuanced than I’m giving them credit for – they’re victims of having to make a case in two sentences or less. And I’m not criticizing journalists – we suffer from the same forced abridgment in everything we publish. The point is simply that in all of this high-minded talk about responsible wood utilization, what’s often missing is a logger’s voice.

In my town, a place within the supply radius of the proposed Fair Haven mill, ag-land-to forest succession, and in some cases a legacy of high-grading, has led to a wealth of marginal forestland and the need for a dependable low-grade wood market. From a management perspective, the idea is that improvement cutting now can set the stage for future success; in 50 or 100 years, a stand of pasture pine and squirrelly red maple can become a stand of mature sawtimber, and the low-grade wood that’s taken out now can provide us with local jobs and locally produced energy.

But this is the perspective of a magazine editor, one who trades in observations and ideas, not pulpwood and sawlogs. When I asked a logger friend what he thought, the conversation went quickly to raw economics and the view from the field. He said that the nearest chip mill – a 100-mile round trip from here – is currently paying $24 a ton for low-grade wood. This makes a log truck load worth about $430. If you figure $2 a mile in fuel and depreciation – the going rate for a big rig – and a fair wage for a morning’s work driving truck, he ends up making around $150 for cutting, skidding, bucking to 8 foot lengths, and loading a tri-axle load of wood. This doesn’t factor in fuel and skidder depreciation, insurance premiums if he has them, travel to and from the job site, money for a forester or landowner, nothing else. So sure, another market for that wood might be nice because the competition could bring higher prices. But his margins have been squeezed so tight for so long by a lot of different parties that he’ll get excited about a new mill when he sees a decent wage.

This would be a good jumping off point for a lot of different conversations, but the idea here was just to point out that the logger is an often ignored link in the wood supply chain. And while we’re discussing big new ideas – be it a new bio-energy plant in Vermont or a newly reopened paper mill in Maine – we’d be wise to take into account the economics of forestry endeavors at the woods level.

I like to think that there’s still a place for a logger with a cable skidder going forward, even in a fuel-wood cut. I like to imagine that someday my kids won’t see the loggers in Kathleen’s paintings as relics, even while they’ll certainly giggle at the funny looking old vehicles. I’m interested in what you loggers and logging contractors see out there. What’s the woods business like in your part of the Northeast? Send us a letter and tell us your story, and we’ll do our best to put some sort of appropriate frame around your thoughts. NW

The pie chart below shows the key sources of income that keep the magazines coming to your mailbox and the lights on in the Northern Woodlands office. You’ll see that your subscriptions are the single most important segment; this year’s subscription revenues exceeded $227,000. That’s about 4 percent more than last year, though newsstand sales have stayed flat and sales through distributors have dropped as many bookstores struggle to remain open. Our advertising revenues peaked in the salad days of the economy between 2005 and 2008. But, like subscriptions, we edged up over last year by 3.8 percent. This speaks more about the loyalty of our advertisers than it does economic trends. It also speaks to your loyalty as consumers: when you support our advertisers, you support Northern Woodlands. Our donors were particularly generous last year. While the number of donors dropped by 7 percent, there was an increase in the total dollar amount of contributions – some 5.5 percent. It is worth noting that the Board of Directors’ giving grew 15 percent over the previous year, exceeding a budget goal of $25,000. Collectively, individual donors gave just under $180,000. You can find a list of all who contributed on page 68.

You truly rose to the occasion this year. Thank you. And thanks, too, for remembering us in your year-end giving this holiday season. I hope that this issue of Northern Woodlands will serve as a tangible reminder of how well we’ve put your past contributions to good use.

Season’s greetings from all of us at Northern Woodlands!

In forestry parlance, a grassy meadow such as this is called a “permanent opening,” and the idea of creating such an opening is sometimes overlooked by landowners and land managers. For one thing, creating a permanent opening can be expensive. For another, cutting down the forest and preventing it from growing back can seem antithetical to forest management.

Yet the idea is gaining converts because permanent openings – especially ones that are created for their own sake and not as a prelude to a house and driveway – can be very valuable for wildlife. Permanent openings attract new and unusual animal species, as well as improving conditions for existing animals.

Good Forestry in the Granite State: Recommended Voluntary Forest Management Practices for New Hampshire, a document published and periodically updated by the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extension program (see center text), includes a discussion of permanent openings that begins, “Permanent openings up to a few acres in size and dominated by grasses, forbs, brambles, or shrubs provide valuable habitat for many wildlife species…. They provide necessary habitat for about 22 percent of New England’s wildlife species and seasonally important habitat to nearly 70 percent, including ‘species of greatest conservation need’ such as the eastern towhee and New England cottontail.”

Good Forestry goes on to note that permanent openings are most valuable to wildlife in areas that otherwise consist of continuous, unbroken forest, and that openings of five acres or more are the most likely to attract new species. Openings of two acres or less will still increase the abundance of existing species, and two bird species – the chestnut-sided warbler and the common yellowthroat – will be attracted to new openings of almost any size.

If you’re thinking about creating a permanent opening on your property, the chief consideration is this: you’re going to have to mow it. Not every year perhaps, but at least once every five years or so to keep the forest from returning, and more often if you want to support grasses.

This means that you need to be able to get a mower to the site, presumably via a woods road or logging access, and that you’ll be able to operate the mower once you get there. Wet soils, boulder fields, and steep slopes aren’t good candidates. Rough, pillow-and-cradle terrain or areas with large stumps are also less suitable, though these can be smoothed out with a one-time use of heavy equipment.

If you’re starting to worry about the dollar signs adding up, consider creating your permanent opening during a scheduled timber harvest. You’ll have revenue coming in and much of the necessary equipment is already on site. You’ll have an outlet for the cut wood, and you’ll be able to subtract the expense of creating the opening against the timber revenue, thereby lowering your tax bill. Instead of giving that money to the tax man, you’ll be giving it to the chestnut-sided warblers.

An obvious place to create a permanent opening is wherever you’re going to establish a log landing anyway. You simply increase the size of the opening – using the equipment and road access already available – and make sure the landing is free of stumps and slash so that it can be mowed.

An obvious place not to put a permanent opening is in the midst of a beautiful stand of perfect hardwood stems, many of them about a foot in diameter, heavy to oak and sugar maple. In other words, don’t cut down your best wood, and definitely consider working with your forester to select potential sites.

Another point to consider is what kind of vegetation you want to have in your permanent opening. If you don’t choose, you’ll end up with whatever happens to sprout after the work is done, usually some combination of raspberries, pioneer plants such as mullein, and early successional tree species like pin cherry and white pine. Maintaining this mix of species will require mowing only every three to five years.

But if your land is relatively flat and you’re going to have the stumps removed, it’s possible to establish a grassy meadow. Seeding clover into the opening will feed a whole host of species, especially deer, though keeping a field in clover does require mowing several times per year to prevent taller grasses from overshadowing it. It’s well worth having a soil test done (contact your local extension office for details) before planting the meadow to see if lime or other nutrients would be helpful. Be sure to use only clean, native seed that’s not going to bring invasive species into the middle of your woods.

Good Forestry in the Granite State is available online and has many more recommendations for anyone seriously considering a permanent opening. Leaving slash in the middle of the opening, for example, is best for protecting amphibians, while removing the slash is better for attracting breeding woodcock in the spring.

One thing that Good Forestry doesn’t mention is aesthetic appeal: permanent openings can open up lovely vistas, showcase interesting features, and become destinations for regular walks. All of these will increase your enjoyment of your land and make the investment well worth it – especially if you catch a male woodcock’s aerial spring display.

A Good Read

Good Forestry in the Granite State is finding readers well beyond New Hampshire’s borders. The publication was the result of a collaboration between public, private, and non-profit professionals; the list of contributors to the most recent edition runs two pages and includes landowners, truckers, foresters, biologists, conservationists, and environmentalists. This widely used document is being incorporated into best-practice management guidelines for conservation easements in New Hampshire.

Perkins’ perspective began to change at Sterling College in northern Vermont, where she studied wildlife and natural resource management. “It’s hard to remember how I shifted from being against it to being more aware,” she told me recently. “I think it was really the human ecology teachings of Sterling.” There, learning extended beyond the classroom to the campus farm and woodlot, and Perkins recalls that she was “starting to feel drawn to the notion of growing your own food and cutting your own wood.”

Among her classmates and teachers, Perkins was also getting to know hunters. She began to see that they were students of animals and habitats. “They knew so much about the woods and wildlife.” Though her father and uncle had hunted when she was a girl, Perkins had always perceived it as a purely recreational pursuit. She had never seen hunting as part of a broader set of cultural values, encompassing stewardship of the land, a sense of place, and an awareness of how interconnected everything is. At Sterling, she began to grasp these aspects. “It wasn’t just ‘Go out and shoot a deer in cold blood.’ That killing moment is a very small part of a much larger experience.”

Several years later, with encouragement from a boyfriend, Perkins took up a gun herself. “As a skill, it was so challenging and exciting to learn,” she recalls. Perkins also found the hunt grounding. “I felt more true to my identity as an outdoors person,” she told me. “Thinking about the animal’s habitat and behavior – and the pursuit – it feels very innate to me. It’s not just a sport. It’s about going out your back door and experiencing a deep, meaningful connection to the wildness around you.”

Jacob Racusin, a builder from Montgomery, Vermont, who specializes in using natural materials, didn’t expect to become a hunter either. Growing up in the Upper Valley of the Connecticut River, where many out-of-staters like his parents have settled in recent decades, he had no connection to hunting. Especially in high school, kids from hunting families and kids from non-hunting families seemed to inhabit separate cultural worlds. But in his early twenties, shortly after he and his wife started homesteading and – for health reasons – abandoned their vegan diet, he got curious about taking up a rifle in pursuit of meat.

Partly, Racusin was attracted by the possibility of procuring high-quality food and steering clear of factory farms. Mainly, though, he took up hunting for the same reason that he and his wife spend so much time tending their vegetable garden, growing medicinal herbs, planting fruit trees, and raising sheep: “A huge part of it is just developing a closer relationship with our land and with our woods – understanding who else is living in our woods, getting to know our woodland ecology, and having a strong sense of place.”

Over the past eight years, Racusin has found that hunting helps him step back from his usual habits of constant productivity: tending family, profession, gardens, and animals. “Usually when I’m in my woods, it involves a chainsaw. So I really appreciate the opportunity to sit still in the woods, to spend that much time in observation and not just in action.”

Steve Morrell – a third unlikely hunter – grew up in Yonkers, New York, just north of Manhattan. Though an urban kid, he was always drawn to the outdoors. He joined the Boy Scouts, loved to go fishing and camping, and even had a toy bow and a passing interest in hunting. But he had no way to get involved. Hunting was the stuff of stories. He didn’t know anyone who actually did it.

The catalyst came along when he was 30: a friend invited him to check out the local indoor archery range, not far from where Morrell lives in Queens. From day one, Morrell was hooked on the bow, and his boyhood interest in hunting soon resurfaced.

At first, the hunt was simply exciting. Morrell felt the kind of enthusiasm he feels for any new endeavor, any new hobby. “Going into the woods was such an unbelievable learning experience,” he recalls. “And there was nothing as exciting as seeing deer. I don’t know why. There’s just something about deer.” Over the past eight years, though, his hunting has taken on greater depth. Like Perkins and Racusin, Morrell craves the quiet time, especially in the woods surrounding the cabin he and his wife bought in the Catskills two years ago.

Most of all, Morrell appreciates the venison. “Hunting,” he told me, “is about putting healthy food in my body.” And it’s also about sharing that food. After Morrell gets a deer, he throws a dinner party. “I like to cook,” he said. “I do some pretty elaborate things, like venison Wellington. It’s delicious.”

Why they hunt

Across the United States, hunting license sales have been declining for decades. In Vermont, for example, more than 140,000 hunting licenses were sold in 1974. By 2005, that number had dropped to just over 80,000. It has long been assumed that efforts to counter this trend and recruit new hunters should be focused on kids and teenagers – young people at risk of losing their family traditions.

According to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey, however, in 2005 one-third of first-time American hunters were 21 or older. This may not be a new phenomenon – longitudinal data are sketchy. But for anyone interested in the future of hunting, these people warrant attention, as do their motivations.

I have spoken with dozens of new, adult hunters here in the Northeast – including several who were once opposed to hunting – and Perkins, Racusin, and Morrell speak for many of them.

These hunters tell me that hunting makes them feel that they are part of nature. As hunters, they feel more fully engaged with the land, walking it and returning to the same places year after year. And they feel more fully engaged with their own senses: listening as the pre-dawn forest comes alive with birdsong, watching as clouds of ducks rise up off a coastal bay, paying attention to the habits of animals, learning to track deer or to strike up a call-and-response conversation with a wild turkey.

Some talk about connection in spiritual terms, describing the forest as their church, or the wind in the trees as the breath of the divine. Many speak of feeling connected to humanity’s ancestral roots. “I always think about what we were like as a species before all this civilization and technology,” Perkins told me.

Most fundamentally, they say they feel like participants in the food chain. As one hunter put it, they feel like they “belong to the cycle.”

Food is a primary motive for many of these hunters. They want to eat healthy food, to be directly involved in procuring it, and to bypass the industrial food system. Many grow their own vegetables, raise chickens, or keep bees, and want to steer clear of antibiotic-laden meat, produce and eggs contaminated by salmonella, and other health hazards. Many refuse to eat factory-farmed meat and feel strongly about the importance of treating land and animals with respect. In short, they want to take nutritional, ethical, and ecological responsibility for their own sustenance. They want to cultivate what Racusin calls “a culture of relationship,” one that identifies humans as part of the ecological systems on which we all depend.

If you listen closely to these hunters, you soon realize that they speak of hunting as a response – even an antidote – to the frenzied distractions and disconnections of modern life.

In part, it’s the deeply-focused state of mind they slip into when hunting. “The worries that you have just kind of melt away,” Morrell said. “It’s like meditation. It really is.” This serves, as another adult convert to hunting put it, as a “time to heal the tragedy of this technological, high-paced world we live in now.”

In part, it’s the sharp contrast between hunting and shopping. As one Maine hunter said, “Part of it is definitely a connection to a world that we have lost connection to. Buying your food in a supermarket is really sterile and duck hunting is not sterile.” Whether they’re retrieving ducks from a salt marsh or fielddressing a whitetail and dragging it out of the woods, these people find that hunting provides a direct, visceral encounter with food, life, death, and – inevitably – killing.

For deer hunters in particular, the powerful, conflicted emotions that accompany even the quickest, most humane kill can be hard to express. “I feel very excited, but I always feel sad, usually cry,” one Vermont hunter told me. “It’s a mixture of awe and sadness. It’s a bunch of things.” These hunters say they feel sorrow at the animal’s death, yet simultaneously feel pride and satisfaction at the hunt’s success, gratitude for the food, and wonder at the mysteries of nature.

“It’s such a primal experience,” Morrell said. “You’re looking at the animal on the ground, and if you think about it, about what you’ve done, you can’t help but feel some sadness. I don’t know. It’s usually outweighed by the happiness, but the sadness is definitely a part of it.”

Cultural connections

Though most of the adult-onset hunters I’ve met grew up without a strong connection to hunting traditions, many have forged friendships with hunters who do have that connection. When Perkins wanted to learn to hunt turkeys, she turned to a friend of hers, a lifelong hunter and Maine Guide. He assured her that the shotgun she already had would be fine, and helped her get her first tom. Through him and others, Perkins feels connected to local hunting traditions. And though her most immediate aim is to fill the freezer with healthy wild meat, in the long view her goals are cultural.

“As a Mainer,” she told me, “I find it sad to see the culture of Old Maine fading. I want to carry the torch of the history of this place. I want to keep that alive, at least in my own family.” Though neither her husband nor her brother hunt, a few years ago Perkins’ uncle gave her an old Winchester 94 that belonged to her great-great-grandfather. And her three-year-old daughter Ada – who has never been shielded from knowing where meat comes from – is already curious about hunting.

Racusin was mentored in a similar fashion, by a lifelong Vermont hunter who introduced him to firearms, loaned him a rifle, and showed him the basics of deer hunting. Like Perkins, Racusin now feels connected to local tradition. It can be as simple as bumping into someone in the hardware store during deer season, and striking up a conversation about where the bucks might be. “It gives me a culture I can identify with,” he said. “It grounds me not just in physical place, but in community, too.”

Also like Perkins, Racusin is eager to pass on the adopted tradition. His hunting already revolves around his twelve-year old son, Elijah, and Racusin is gratified to know that the boy sees and understands the many ways his family engages with, and is sustained by, the land.

Living in Queens, Morrell had no mentor. He learned to hunt by reading articles, by spending time in the woods, and by trial and error. There is, he told me, no local hunting culture for him to connect with. Hunters are a tiny minority in New York City, especially in the fashionable, cosmopolitan profession of advertising where he works as a copywriter.

Yet Morrell feels that he, too, is part of a larger culture: not a hunting tradition that is dying, but one that is being renewed. “As part of the food movement, I think we’re going to see a resurgence of interest in hunting,” he said. “People are thinking about where their food comes from and what it means.”

Perhaps it is here that hunters and non-hunters can find the most common ground – in our shared recognition that drawing sustenance directly from the land yields more than meat and vegetables, firewood and lumber. It yields more than food, warmth, and shelter. It also yields meaning.

We were on a mission to camera-trap a bobcat.

If you’re going to photograph any kind of wildlife, knowledge of the animal is paramount. You cannot be a successful wildlife photographer if you’re not familiar with the habits and habitat of your subject. Indeed, the first rule of wildlife photography is go where there’s a lot of wildlife. Limited resources, like food and shelter, and seasonal events such as migration or reproduction, bring otherwise widely dispersed animals together, forming what’s referred to as clumped distribution. Some species, like bees at a hive, ant colonies, or prairie dogs have permanently clumped distributions. Other species, like birds at a roost, form frequent, albeit transient, clumps. Still other species, like bobcats, never congregate outside of the breeding season.

I’ve been photographing the landscapes and wildlife of the northeast as a professional nature photographer for over 20 years now, and I can hardly think of a species more challenging than the bobcat. Bobcats are wary of humans, and I’ve found that the mere handling of bait, footprints, or any human artifacts at the site can spook this animal. Though not impossible – I know a photographer who, after spending two winters sitting in his blind at subzero temperatures, got a few nice frames of a bobcat, as well as severe frostbite in his hands – it is improbable that one will get a good photograph of a bobcat in the wild. Hence, we decided to try using remote cameras.

Now considering the bobcat’s transient nature, and the fact that there are only about 3,000 of them in the entire state of Vermont (that’s not even a single bobcat per three square miles), you might conclude that we were on a fool’s errand. Yet, as dispersed as they are, bobcats have their favorite haunts, places where they are more likely to be found at any given time. As regular readers of Northern Woodlands know, cats use field edges and riparian zones – the banks of rivers and streams – as travel corridors. They’re also fond of ledges. This information tips the odds in favor of the camera hunter.

Jeff and I started scouting for this particular photo shoot earlier in the winter, when it was much easier to track animals. We looked for ledgy areas near rivers and then scouted the area for tracks and scent markings. When we discovered fresh bobcat tracks in the snow, we followed them. At times, the track swerved toward a scent-marking post – a tree trunk or some other object poking up out of the snow where the cat left its scent. If the tracks were ambiguous, we would breathe on the trunk to warm the urine and confirm the identification of the tracks by smelling the distinct, catlike odor of the marking. Because bobcats use scent marks to communicate with each other, strapping a camera to a marking post will, in time, yield a shot of a bobcat – though on second thought, you might want to strap the camera to a tree facing the scent mark.

For this particular shoot we opted to set up on a ledgy rim of rust-streaked yellow rocks about 300 yards beyond the Missisquoi River. Jeff and I had scouted out the serpentine ledges shortly after the first snowfalls in early December. To our delight, we found bobcat tracks, scat, and a number of scent markings all along the scree slope. We agreed on two places where we would establish our remote camera sites.

Now, a month later and in deeper snow, we found traversing the snow-covered scree slope to be a dodgy undertaking. There’s hardly any even footing, and it’s easy to plummet into a crevice between boulders hidden by a mantle of snow like a pit trap. We carefully angled our way over the scree to the base of the ledges, and before long arrived at one of our remote camera sites – a recess on the front of the cliff with a flat, rocky shelf that provides an ideal perch for a cat. It had a bit of an overhang, to which we could wire the goats. About six feet in front of the recess were two spruce trees where we could strap a couple of the cameras at slightly different angles. This arrangement would make it very likely that a cat would face a camera while it ate.

Jeff removed his snowshoes, clambered up onto the shelf, and began securing the bait, while I double checked the settings on the cameras, secured them to the tree trunks, and aimed them at Jeff ’s ankles, just about where we’d expect a bobcat to be when feeding on the carcasses.

Among the principal dos and don’ts of responsible nature photography is the requirement that the photographer not affect the behavior of the subject in any way. It might seem that using bait to attract an animal violates this rule, but bobcats are scavengers as well as hunters. Especially in winter, when some portion of their regular diet is lacking, bobcats will scavenge for whatever meat they can find, dead or alive. Nevertheless, ethics apply. It would be totally irresponsible to lure a cat, or any wild animal, off of its home ground, especially to a place that might put the animal in harm’s way. Place the bait along the animal’s usual route and keep it far afield of human activity, such that only you and the bobcat know where to find it.

In addition to ethical matters, there are other considerations in establishing a bait site. First, choose the appropriate bait. If you’ve ever lived with a cat, you know that they can be extremely fussy about their food. Bait that broadcasts a strong odor, even in cold weather, such as fish, will help your subject home in on your bait site and camera. If you do not have access to odorous bait, then augment the olfactory appeal of your bait with wildlife lures. Cats hate intruders, so smear some bobcat gland lure (available at any trapping supply company) on the trees around your bait site and the resident cat will come to investigate and defend its territory. If it’s below freezing, you might consider adding some propylene glycol to the lure, which will keep it from freezing. Never use tainted meat and only use bait when it’s cold enough to prevent meat from rotting before it’s consumed. Also, be sure to secure the bait. You want your subject to spend all of its time feasting in front of your camera. Don’t underestimate the strength of the animal – a bobcat can drag the carcass of a full-grown deer out of sight through deep snow.

I tend to ignore the conventional wisdom to keep the sun over my shoulder when I position game cameras. Instead, I find a shady but well-lit spot, something north-facing so that the camera isn’t triggered by the reflection of sunlight off trees, rocks, and snow. (Remember, these cameras are triggered by both movement and infrared radiation.) Keep branches, grasses, or anything that will move when the wind blows out of the composition to avoid hundreds of false exposures and thus drain the batteries prematurely.

I strive for a solid background in the composition, in the case of bobcats, typically a ledge. A fairly homogenous background about five feet behind where you expect to photograph your subject reduces clutter and prevents the background from going completely black whenever the camera fires its strobe. These cameras use wide-angle lenses so the nice separation one gets with a telephoto lens between a soft background and the sharp foreground isn’t possible. Position your camera and walk in front of it to get some test shots, with and without the flash. Depending on the quality of your camera, you may decide to leave the flash off and rely solely on daytime exposures, since our experience is that flashed images taken with these game cameras do not result in good exposures. Look for bright spots or distracting objects and make sure the camera is level and aimed properly. A few moments spent now to clean up the composition will save you heartache a week or two later when you discover that, though you have several dozen images of a beautiful bobcat, some consistent flaw in the composition means that no amount of Photoshop magic will save your images.

Finally, top off your odds of getting that keeper photo by using more than one camera. I know these units are a considerable investment, but so is your time, and if you’re sufficiently passionate about becoming a camera hunter, my advice to you would be to get at least two cameras. We usually position our cameras such that one faces the bait directly and another is off to the side, in order to capture a profile of the animal as it approaches. Jeff and I have just snowshoed three miles at 7oF, in deep snow, carrying 40 pounds of dead goat and gear on our backs over hazardous terrain. What’s more, we’ll be doing this repeatedly over the course of a New England winter. When that bobcat finally arrives at the bait site, we don’t want to rely on only one camera to get the shot.

Jeff and I tend to be meticulous and organized when we work in the field. We work quickly to reduce the disturbance we create at each site, but deliberately to be sure we haven’t overlooked anything. We broke off a couple of twigs from a spruce tree, dipped them into the bottle of wildlife lure, and wiped the twigs as high on the trunks and branches of nearby trees as we could reach in order to broadcast the scent far and wide. We had to remove our mittens to accomplish most of these tasks and our fingers were nearly frostbitten. The pain was excruciating. We broke out the disposable warm packs, shook them, and shoved them into our mittens. Finally, we consulted the checklist we made, including every detail, from mounting the bait in such a way that it does not appear in the composition to remembering to turn on the cameras. Satisfied that we’d not neglected any detail of the setup, we strapped on our snowshoes and headed down the scree slope, back to the river, and upstream about a mile to our second site.

Soon, the heat inside my mittens thawed my aching fingers. I reached into my jacket pocket for a couple of granola bars and handed one to Jeff. Along the way, we identified a number of tracks zig-zagging across the river – otter, turkey, deer, fisher, coyote, even a moose. Rounding a bend in the river, we caught a glimpse of an otter ducking into a hole in the ice while, off to the southwest, the bell at the Monastery of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Westfield tolled noon.

When we returned to download the images two weeks later, among lots of snapshots of mice, raccoons, ravens, and a turkey vulture, we found this magazine-quality shot of a bobcat. I can’t wait to strap on snowshoes this winter and try to replicate the success, though I hope to skip the frostbite this time.

In the Northeast, one can encounter 67 native and naturalized tree species, each with its own distinctive bark that often changes as trees mature. Spend a contemplative afternoon in the woods, and you might begin to wonder where all this diversity comes from. Why do species such as American beech maintain smooth, unbroken bark for their entire lifespans (if they avoid the ravages of beech bark disease), while the bark of northern red oak, black cherry, and most other species in this region cracks and thickens over time? The gleaming white trunks of paper birch are easy to recognize – but why are they so different from their gray and brown neighbors?

These questions are a great entry point into the world of bark ecology. Drought, temperature, fire, growing seasons, and interactions with other organisms all influence bark characteristics. But there are more subtle factors at play here as well, including physiological adaptations that go back millions of years.

Bark Structure

To understand why different trees display different styles of bark, we must first understand the inner workings of a tree. The term “bark” is often used to describe only the corky, visible outer surface of trunks and branches. In botanical terms, though, bark includes the entire, multi-layered shell of a tree that can be detached from the wood. That is, everything outside a thin ring of tissue called the vascular cambium. Cells divide and grow in the vascular cambium layer, producing a ring of wood to the inside and a layer of bark tissue, called the active phloem, to the outside. The active phloem transports sugars and nutrients throughout the tree, and is typically hidden from view, beneath the outer bark.

Outside the active phloem, trees have three additional bark layers, collectively called the periderm. You may need a scalpel and a microscope to find the first two layers, which are quite thin and also hidden from view. The inner layer – the cork skin – usually contains chlorophyll and does some photosynthesizing. The middle, cork cambium layer facilitates cell growth. The third, outer layer is made up of cork cells that die soon after they mature. This cork layer protects the tree from infection, infestation, and drying out. The smooth, unbroken outer bark that all trees start out with is this cork layer of the periderm.

As a tree grows, its wood thickens and pushes out against the bark that surrounds it. The different ways in which the outer bark adapts to this pressure is what gives each species its distinctive appearance. Some species maintain their original outer layers (the initial periderm) for their entire lives. In such cases, the outer bark expands to match the growth of the wood beneath it, and remains unbroken. On the smooth bark of beech trees, for instance, you can still decipher decades-old graffiti.

In most northeastern species, however, pressure from the faster-growing wood soon causes the initial periderm to split like a tight pair of jeans. When the initial periderm breaks, a new layer of active periderm forms to the inside. This new periderm usually forms in overlapping sections that vary in shape, size, and thickness according to species. Any cells trapped outside the active periderm become isolated and die. This process can repeat itself as a tree grows. Alternating layers of old periderm and dead phloem form the thick, craggy, flakey, outer bark that is found on most mature trees. Botanists call this protective outer bark the rhytidome, from the Greek rhytidoma, for wrinkle.

In each tree species, the bark’s appearance is determined by the shape of the overlapping sections of periderm, the type of connective tissue, and the rate at which layers of bark break apart. In black cherry, for example, the scales correspond to the size and shape of the periderm sections, which break apart from each other. In species such as northern red oak, sections of outer bark stay connected to form thick, vertical ridges.

Thick or Thin?

It’s impossible not to notice how some mature tree species, like black oak, have remarkably thick bark, while others, like beech, do not. Thick outer bark is generally a good investment, since it better protects a tree from wounds and provides more thermal protection. The outer bark’s air-filled cells function much like in home insulation, keeping the inside warmer or cooler than the outside. Ridges, scales, and vertical strips can function as radiator fins, dramatically increasing the outer surface area and helping to maintain a more even temperature. Contoured barks also hold moisture, which slows the transfer of heat through the outer bark.

Thick bark is especially important for fire protection. For example, black oak, which typically grows in drier, more fireprone habitat than any other species in the red oak group, develops thick bark earlier than any of these relatives. The outer bark of pitch pine, the most fire-adapted species in this region, thickens while the trees are still young and develops into deep, corky blocks that allow it to grow in dry habitats on rocky summits and sand plain forests that are susceptible to fire.

Fire is not the only thermal threat to trees; rapid temperature changes can also damage or kill sections of bark. In winter, for example, direct sunlight can warm bark to temperatures much higher than the surrounding air. When the sun sets and temperatures plummet, the rapidly cooling bark can crack as it contracts.

With all the protective advantages of thick bark, why does the bark of some species in our region remain thin? As well as requiring less effort to produce, a major advantage of thin bark is the increased ability to photosynthesize. Scraping away the outer bark on a twig or young branch reveals the thin, surprisingly green cork skin. This layer can perform, to a lesser degree, the same photosynthesis as leaves. Levels of energy production are highest on newer growth, where up to half of available sunlight can penetrate the outer bark and reach this green layer.

Since thick bark blocks most or all sunlight from reaching the cork skin, photosynthesis levels are usually much higher on species that maintain thin bark on their trunk and branches. Energy produced by bark photosynthesis is thought to support regular cell maintenance in the trunk and branches and can help trees recover from defoliation due to insects, storms, or severe drought. Bark photosynthesis has its heyday in early spring and late fall, when leaves do not shade the bark. But energy can also be produced in a seemingly dormant winter forest. Sunlight warms bark on the south- and southwest-facing sides of trunks and branches, making it possible for bark to photosynthesize even when air temperatures are below freezing.

Thin bark also helps thwart the mosses, lichens, and algae (collectively called epiphytes) that grow on trees and sometimes become a nuisance. Epiphytes can block sunlight, thus preventing efficient photosynthesis. They can also absorb heat, which increases a tree’s risk of damage from temperature changes. Beech developed smooth bark, which is difficult for epiphytes to gain a foothold on, because it evolved in tropical climates where epiphytes can amass in such large numbers that they break branches or pull down trunks; it maintained this trait as it migrated to cooler climates. Some trees, like paper birch, feature strips of bark that peel away from the trunk and take with them any light-blocking epiphytes that may have become established there. This peeling process also keeps lenticels, which are vital to bark photosynthesis, from becoming blocked.

Bark Defenses

Like the exterior walls of a house, outer bark not only regulates temperature, it also protects against intruders. In general, thin-barked species like American beech are easier to penetrate than species with thick bark, like northern red oak. But bark of any thickness has weak spots at lenticels, at cracks and furrows, and at branch junctions, where wrinkles bring the inner bark closer to the surface. Wounds in the outer bark open pathways for invaders such as fungi, bacteria, and insects, but in most cases the bark’s chemical and structural defenses can overcome infections and infestations.

Resins in conifers (which give species like balsam fir their pleasing smell) and the gums in black cherry bark repel insects and infectious agents, seal small wounds to prevent desiccation and infection, and trap insects. Black cherry bark also contains hydrocyanic acid, which gives off a sour, bitter-almond scent that wards off browsers, and has long been used by humans in cough medicines, as an expectorant, and to sooth sore throats.

Betulin, which whitens the bark of paper birch, deters gnawing animals, fungi, insects, and other invaders, helping to make up for the easy penetrability of this species’ thin outer bark. A host of medicinal properties are under investigation for betulin, including its potential as an anti-cancer drug. The inner bark of aspen and other members of the willow family contains salicin, a compound that deters bacteria, fungi, and insects. Salicin has long been used by humans as a pain reliever, and is the precursor of synthetically produced aspirin.

Structural mechanisms also defend a tree against infection and infestation, and can alter the appearance of bark in the process. Fungi that breach the outer bark, for example, can be walled off, or compartmentalized. This action contains the infection, but it also kills sections of bark by blocking the incoming flow of water and nutrients. The resulting small areas of discolored, sunken, or cracked bark are called annual cankers. Perennial cankers form when fungi that were initially compartmentalized overcome this defense by continuing to grow while the tree is dormant, or by colonizing the wood beneath the bark and bypassing the blockade. This cycle of incursion and walling off can repeat year after year, causing sections of bark to crack, break apart, and eventually separate from the trunk.

Some structural responses cause visible changes in the outer bark that help with tree identification. In this region, the perennial target canker – a series of concentric cracks in the outer bark – is found exclusively on red maple, though not on every tree. The circular cracks mark the cycles of the disease’s progress and the tree’s subsequent compartmentalization. Neither the tree nor the fungus seems to gain the upper hand, and this competition can continue year after year.

If an infection spreads around the circumference of the trunk, the resulting cankers can girdle and kill the tree. In the early 1900s, infections of this magnitude, caused by a nonnative fungus, nearly eliminated American chestnut.

Even when an infection or infestation is controlled, a tree must contend with a breach in the protective outer bark – like a broken window in a house – that other invaders could exploit. The inner bark generates cork to surround a wound, and can close small openings and narrow or close large gaps over time. Eastern hemlock is the only species in this region that produces wound cork in annual increments that you can count – like rings of wood – to determine a wound’s age.

Despite its multiple chemical and structural defenses, bark can’t protect trees from all attackers, especially introduced organisms for which a species has no evolved resistance. Beech bark disease illustrates the domino effect that can be initiated by a simple wound. The thin bark of American beech provides many advantages, but this species has no defense against the beech scale, a tiny insect smaller than the head of a pin, accidentally introduced from Europe in the 1800s. When these insects penetrate the bark to feed on sap, they chemically alter the bark in a way that allows a fungus to invade at a later time. A tree’s efforts to compartmentalize these infections typically fail. The resulting perennial cankers, which render the trunk and branches almost unrecognizable as beech, facilitate secondary infections and insect infestations that most often lead to the death of the tree.

Not all associations between bark and other organisms are parasitic. Some bark-inhabiting fungi and bacteria are thought to survive solely on exudates from their host, and do no harm. Other fungi and bacteria defend their hosts by out-competing or preying upon canker-causing fungi. These beneficial organisms are often found near lenticels or other weak areas of bark where pathogens might gain entry. When tiny insects, such as springtails and bark-lice, inhabit bark and feed on mosses, lichens, and fungi growing there, they can benefit their host tree by attracting spiders, ants, and other predators that can help control populations of defoliating insects.

At any given moment in your local forests, there are thousands of interactions between bark and the environment. We can’t easily see most of them, but visible features of bark hint at this invisible interplay. On a winter hike you might spy the luminous, whitebarked branches of a sycamore tree and imagine bark photosynthesis cranking out a little supplemental energy. Or conversely, you might feel kinship with an eastern hemlock – its multi-layered bark providing the same hedge against the winter chill as your multi-layered clothing.

Take some time to look at bark up close. Notice the resin blisters on balsam fir, the patchwork of thick plates on mature black birch, the way poplar bark changes so dramatically as the trees age. Perhaps you will be willing to strip off your gloves in the cold and get your hands on some bark – you might compare the smooth surface of a beech trunk with the rough ridges of a red oak, or notice the multiple layers of scales on a black cherry. At the very least, you will find that the world of bark is more than just a monotonous blur of browns and grays. To a tree, it’s a complex world of function; to an observer, it’s a source of beauty that shows itself best against the contrast of snowy winter woods.

Prior to 2005, when the restriction went into effect, just over half of the bucks being shot in Vermont’s fall rifle season were spikehorns – yearling males with straight antlers that don’t fork.

Hunters killed spikehorns disproportionately because young bucks tend to be less savvy than older bucks and because, on a percentage basis, there are more of them. But while it might seem that killing lots of younger bucks would leave more older bucks behind, it doesn’t work out that way since, over time, the only way to have older bucks is to make sure they survive being young.

The lack of bucks meant that the deer herd was increasingly skewed in favor of female deer, as more does were surviving to maturity. This, in turn, was putting a strain on the overall ecosystem, since a doe-heavy herd increases more rapidly than a balanced one. Biologists with Vermont’s Department of Fish and Wildlife were eager to correct the herd imbalance, both to prevent overpopulation and, at the same time, under-population following harsh winters.

Fish and Wildlife officials had a cultural problem to address as well: many hunters prefer to shoot bucks with large antlers, and the relative scarcity of large deer in Vermont meant that those hunters were increasingly hunting elsewhere.

Once the antler restriction was enacted in 2005, biologists quickly began to see the hoped-for results: male deer became more evenly spread out across all ages, the average harvested buck became larger, the herd overall became more resilient and balanced, and more hunters began to see big antlers.

But here’s the rub: antler size is partially hereditary. Some bucks grow bigger antlers than others, given equal access to food. In fact, bucks with the very best genetics can grow multiple-tined antlers starting as yearlings, while their average compatriots are just growing spikes. Research also confirms that the bucks with the largest antlers as yearlings will be the bucks with the largest antlers at every stage of life.

Vermont’s antler-restriction law may, therefore, be inadvertently high-grading the herd: removing the best youngsters and leaving the rest. Your average yearling is protected while your above-average yearling is legal. Fish and Wildlife officials are aware of the potential problem: “The selection for smaller bucks will likely produce an increasing population of smaller bucks in the buck population. This is not a desirable outcome.”

What’s to be done? State biologists in Texas, faced with the same dilemma, have made it legal to shoot both the smallest bucks (spikehorns) and the largest bucks (an antler rack at least 13 inches across), thereby protecting the males that fall in the middle, including the best yearlings.

Other options would be to increase the antler restriction even further, to say three points on one side, or do away with the antler restriction altogether and return to the pre-2005 conditions. But neither of these options favors the best genetics.

Complicating the decision is the fact that antler genetics are passed on equally through bucks and does. This, at the very least, is slowing down the high-grading, since does aren’t being selected based on their nonexistent antlers. Another factor is that Vermont’s rifle season coincides with the peak of the breeding season, not the start of the season. Many of the largest bucks with the largest antlers will have already passed on their genetics earlier in the fall, before rifle season opens.

Then again, the below-average spikehorns that survive mild winters are also passing their genetics on early in the season.

One of the great challenges facing a hunter during deer season is having something to occupy the mind during the long hours of lying in wait. A decent conundrum with no clear answer – such as, how to positively influence the size and genetics of Vermont’s deer herd – is not such a bad thing to have.