Articles

A friend recently showed up at my workshop complaining that his chainsaw was “bogging” and wouldn’t run at full throttle. He assumed the issue was related to fuel delivery…

Arising before dawn in ritual pursuit aware of austerity, sharp, acute a chill that has settled and defines for a time the spoils of silently watching. As the hoary frost on crimson leaves…

Murph and I had ducked into the woods in Phippsburg around 9:30 a.m., hoping to escape the July heat. No spring chickens, we ambled more than we hiked and only covered a few miles before…

For six weeks every October and November, Sean Flint spends two or three days a week walking through thick underbrush in Vermont and flushing ruffed grouse with his dog, Finn. Last year, Flint…

“We’re creating a model that can be replicated in other ecoregions. We must preserve these arks of biodiversity. Seed sovereignty is a tool of resilience in the face of climate…

Each fall, as days grow shorter and the sun dips lower in the sky, the last of the year’s run of Atlantic salmon swim through the cold waters of the Penobscot River and its tributaries,…

Every autumn, North Branch Nature Center in Montpelier, Vermont hosts a banding station for migrating northern saw-whet owls, a common but seldom-seen woodland species. Tig Tillinghast…

Forests and rivers are inseparable in my mind. When I worked on the Penobscot River Restoration Project in Maine from 2005 to 2015, I became familiar with how this particular river changes its…

I’ve been spending many weekend hours up on our hill, cutting down stands of invasive honeysuckle. I use a hand saw and work slowly, stopping every time I hear the approaching chime of a…

For more than 200 years, dams built on waterways up and down the East Coast helped to move and sort timber, power sawmills and gristmills, and produce hydroelectric power. These dams shut off…

Bill Gould, a member of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, and Reid Schwarz, a woodworker and toolmaker, launched their first birchbark canoe onto local waters in New Hampshire in…

During World War II, all across the country, women stepped in to fill jobs traditionally performed by the men who had gone to war. One of these women was Virginia Pearson, who in the summer of…

Dale Brooks says it was Sonny Congdon who taught him how to saw, and so John Rozensky would have helped teach him as well because Sonny and John were working together at that time running…

I climbed the heavy miles of rock hot through the forest up to the gravel avenue through the krummholz, the heat now descending to cooled tundra paved with tiny wildflowers yellow and white…

For me, the challenges of the pandemic have had a silver lining, directly in my sightline. I have stayed home and kept a journal. Daily, I have re-engaged slow fun, the spin of the planet from…

For foresters in the Northeast, spring means mud season. In addition to making timber harvesting more difficult, operating heavy equipment during mud season can be detrimental to soil and tree…