Articles

It was August in northern New York, and the leaves still shone an optimistic green. But Labor Day was closing in, and my wife Lisa and I would soon join millions of other parents as empty…

One of the most common questions that foresters get is, “How old is this tree?” Often, the response is less than satisfactory, as the forester carries on about site…

White-tailed deer are so abundant in the eastern United States that it may be hard to believe the species was absent in many areas, including most of the Northeast, just a century ago.…

While walking in a milkweed patch at dusk, Tig Tillinghast found a flower crab spider that had just ambushed and immobilized a fly. “It was difficult to get adequate depth for this…

Mere hours old, a comical procession of 12 downy puffs drop one by one from their nest cavity 30 feet high in a white ash snag. Scrambling to keep up with their mother, a female wood duck,…

While orb webs – with their appealing spiral geometry – are the most familiar, spiderwebs take an amazing diversity of forms, each an ingenious fit for its maker’s hunting…

Two of the regular columns in the Summer 2023 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine are related to northeastern bats. Forest Insights describes opportunities to promote summer bat habitat in…

I’ve seen some bats flying around the edge of my woods, and I’d really like to help them because I know that they’ve been hit pretty badly by white-nose syndrome. Where are…

Noah moves ahead of me in the streambed, walking through a green tunnel, the rest of the world walled off. In July, the woods are thick with leaves, and the rhododendron that crave water grow…

Twenty-five years ago, a student brought me a dead, tattered specimen of a moth. Its prodigious wingspan, colorfully banded fuzzy body, and spectacular wings were unmistakable: cecropia moths…

As a science teacher, I love strawberries not just for their flavor, but also for their DNA. I use strawberries to show high school students how to extract DNA from living tissue. A quirk of…

I’ve tended to think about deer over-browsing in forests as primarily a tree regeneration problem, because that damage is easy to see. In my own woods, the sad, scraggly remains of…

Approximately 50 people contribute to the words and images in each issue of the magazine. Here are some of our Summer 2023 contributors. {image2} Todd Davis (“What the Old Ones Show…

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…