Wood Lit

Bear-ly There is a Moonbeam Award-winning book by Maine children’s author and illustrator Rebekah Raye. In this book, Raye deftly blends rich, informative text on black bears with…

Back when I was a boy, despite the fact that my father wasn’t a deer hunter, I’d always know when it was deer season. Even though we lived in a town where the largest industry was…

As an editor I see a lot of first-person writing cross my desk, and the majority of it is the written equivalent of a selfie. The compulsion to report on oneself goes back millions of years,…

What does one do with a forest? For the past few centuries, North Americans have typically answered that question in one of three ways. One answer was preservation, to leave the forest alone…

In the late 1980s, while in graduate school, I learned of mysterious mass die-offs (and eventual extinctions) of many frog species worldwide – events that played a big role in guiding me…

Readers interested in animal behavior are likely familiar with books such as Mind of the Raven, Geese of Beaver Bog, and Of Wolves and Men (the first two by Bernd Heinrich, the last by Barry…

Whenever one hears about bees these days, it is almost invariably to the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, that the reference is being made. Indeed, the health of this species is of…

Most news about climate change focuses on the dramatic and the exotic: melting glaciers, rising sea level, the loss of polar bear habitat. Boston University field biologist Richard B. Primack…

“Is the great purpose of our species to steal the lives and homes of millions of species and billions of creatures?” asks David Johns, one of the writers featured in Keeping the…

Thanks to the recent rapid compilation of insect photos at www.bugguide.com and other websites, identification of insects has never been easier. Art Evans has taken advantage of these…

I had never thought of eastern hemlock as a forest giant until I visited the mountains of western North Carolina. In my northern New England experience, an old-growth hemlock was a good-sized…

When I was a kid, we stopped by neighboring sugarhouses a few times a year to pick up a gallon of Grade B. I’d hold the plastic jug in my lap on the ride home, and on a few of those…

Follow-the-dream memoirs comprise a good chunk of North Country literature – probably because so many of us came here looking for a better life. Taproot is one such book, and from the…

Ever since the deserved success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, readers have faced an avalanche of titles seeking to show how a seemingly banal…

If you can remember when backpacking meant hiking with an external aluminum frame pack, when hi-tech fabric meant those navy, long-sleeved polypro funk sponges with the little white horizontal…

Maple sugarmaking, as an endeavor, has not suffered from a lack of literary coverage. If you make syrup, chances are you already own Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Maple Sugar Book, which…

When I was a girl, my grandmother gave me a guide to the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains. It was a small book, bound in green cloth, with a page or two for each animal. The drawings…

Sea-run fish are often overlooked in modern life, as fewer and fewer people touch or even see the many species that once clogged Atlantic seaboard rivers. While the general modern disconnect…

The northward creep of red oaks is no secret. On late autumn days, their enduring crimson seems to drive with us up I-91. We could point to climate change, or perhaps thank forgetful blue…

If your pulse jolts hearing the rusty cackle of a turkey; if a fly made of “mallard quill thorax ribbed in gold wire ahead of a roughened white hare drubbing, no wing” is your…