Articles

Extensive wetlands often have masses of winterberry. From afar, its abundant, bright red berries sometimes cause large areas of wetland shrubbery to glow with a reddish orange color well into…

Last winter, I went on a photography binge, trying to get as many pictures of common and good looking fungus specimens as I could find in my neighborhood. I knew at the start that I was…

“Windsor furniture is, I believe, the most characteristically American and the most historically significant furniture style to emerge from eighteenth-century America. It is a democratic…

Does Sugaring with a Vacuum Pump Hurt the Trees? Sap flows out of tap holes in sugar maples when the spring days are warm and the nights are freezing, because those conditions make the…

Finding the kill site was easy. A few days earlier, on the first morning of rifle season, a pair of nearby shots had cracked the frosty quiet of sunrise. I was curious whether the hunter had…

Even the first lamb had needed help, but delivering the second one required the expertise of someone with much more shepherding experience than me. Instead, on the coldest night we’ve ever…

I’ve had an attraction to forests for a long time. It’s right there in my high school yearbook: “I will be studying forestry at ….” After college, I thought I…

Steve Hagenbuch looked up from a thicket of glossy-leaved shrubs and said, “Given the buckthorn problem here, I think single-tree selection might be the best approach. Group selection…

If you are following a compass course through the woods, one sight that can sink your spirits in a hurry is an expanse of common juniper directly ahead. Juniper patches are not as painful to…

A few years back, I saw a very cute ad that featured a photo of a couple of toddlers. The script read, “Come see what we saw.” I wondered what it was that they might have seen, and…

One of the primary principles of safe chainsaw operation is to have control of the saw at all times, including while starting the saw. Because one of your hands must be pulling the starter…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust…

In late July, I spent some time watching maple trumpet skeletonizers under a microscope. At that time they were tiny, just an eighth of an inch long, wispy, and translucent. The…

Green building programs have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years with the objective of shifting the built environment toward more sustainability. As the influence of these programs…

The forests of New England and northern New York are among the most diverse and intricate ecosystems on the planet. With mind-boggling numbers of plant and animal species living in complex…

A climax forest is a good place to start an argument with an ecologist. To some, it is a nice name for forests that have escaped disturbance by outside forces like storms or diseases or…

My friend Dan reached out with the long hardwood branch he had found, placing it in the midpoint of the stream we were attempting to cross. He passed the pole-like branch from hand to hand,…

Back in April, I attended the annual winter meeting of the New England Society of American Foresters (NESAF) in Nashua, New Hampshire. This was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with old…

Alternate-leaved dogwood can withstand considerable shade and is common in the forest understory, especially where soils remain moist. But in dim light, beneath a forest canopy, it rarely puts…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust…