Articles

all-day rain a tentful of ghost stories evening paddle a great blue heron pulls me upriver still pond a turtle pokes his nose through a cloud hemlock shadow — a trout sips a fly

In this second installment of a four-part series focused on forest carbon and supported by the Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation, forest ecologist and tree physiologist Alexandra Kosiba…

Between 60 and 80 percent of plants growing in the Northeast, including many of our food crops, need pollinators to reproduce. While many people associate pollinator habitat with wildflower…

Every year, on the first warm, rainy nights of spring, thousands of spotted salamanders, wood frogs, spring peepers, and other amphibians migrate en masse to their breeding wetlands in a…

Cyanotypes are among the oldest photographic printing processes. In 1842, English chemist, astronomer, and experimental photographer Sir John Herschel invented this technique as a way to copy…

Forestry often involves the blending of technical solutions with ecological knowledge. Such is the case with scarification of the forest floor, which is typically done in conjunction with a…

On a mild day the earth drinks its tea and then begins to sing again even the trees pause to notice, the air is a velvet coat that everyone wants to wear the sky becomes a stair down which…

The migration of birds ranks among our planet’s most conspicuous, awe-inspiring natural phenomena. From nearly every corner of the globe, birds as diverse as hummingbirds and herons,…

Every year just after Memorial Day, when the blackflies are at their cruelest, I take a Maine fishing trip with my brother Jake, his twin daughters, my two sons, and one of my daughters.…

During our first autumn in Westford, Vermont, a wave of ladybugs attempted to make our home theirs for the winter. My wife expressed concern that our toddler might eat one. I replied,…

My mother is a master gardener. In the spring, her beds are an explosion of showy blossoms, and in August, her gardens overflow with vegetables. Although we share a lifelong love of plants,…

Elisa Schine, a graduate student in forestry at the University of Maine, is accustomed to being in predominantly male academic and professional settings. Although forestry has become much more…

On a spring day, Ithaca, New York–based photographer Melissa Groo watched a mother gray squirrel painstakingly move her kits to a new nest. “Grasping them in her mouth,” Groo…

Luthier Eric Bright crafted guitars from salvaged wood of Adirondack spruce “sink logs,” which had settled on the bottom of Schroon Lake during log drives in the 1800s. Bright…

Opened in the autumn of 2021, the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park is breaking new ground for outdoor accessibility and education, especially for school-age children with autism.…

When I first heard of Eric Bright’s custom-built guitars, I knew I needed to find a way to see and play his instruments. I had been researching the period of intense logging that…

By the mid-1800s, loss of forests to agricultural land and hunting had extirpated moose throughout much of the Northeast. With the reversion of large tracts of farmland to forest during the…