Articles

Jays, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, juncos, cardinals – these are the staple birds of winter, familiar to nearly all feeder watchers in the Northeast. In some years, nomadic finches…

Back in the 1980s, I began a long-term project with New England cottontails to explore the causes of their regional decline and how that situation could be reversed. I found that cottontails…

Axes and crosscut saws have survived in the American mind as evidence of our utilitarian relationship with forests. Most of the crosscut saws I see today are hung above mantles or serve as a…

The world’s forests are an essential site of carbon sequestration and storage. As nations work to achieve “net zero” emissions in the coming decades, detailed estimates of…

Jackie Robidoux captured this great blue heron pair during a late winter snowstorm in Horse Hill Nature Preserve in Merrimack, New Hampshire. A photographer and wildlife rehabilitator,…

Soft drinks are the very model of industrially processed food. No one is surprised that they contain artificial colors, flavors, and sweeteners. But people might be surprised that root beer,…

On the New England breakfast table, two things reign supreme: coffee and maple syrup. No stack of pancakes would be complete without a cascade of Grade A and a hot cup of joe – but the…

Forest succession is the process of forest development, a series of stages through which forests progress, each stage following – succeeding – the last. It is tempting to think of…

Roger Damon served more than 48 years on the Mount Washington Volunteer Ski Patrol, but he didn’t know that we would be publishing a photo essay in this issue focused on the Mount…

Last winter, I joined a friend on a walk at the Maine Forest and Logging Museum trails at Leonard’s Mills in Bradley, Maine. It was a perfect winter day, just cold enough to make our…

The Maine Forest and Logging Museum at Leonard’s Mills in Bradley, Maine, celebrates the woods craft and ways of life of colonists in Maine’s North Woods from the late 1700’s…

Imagine this, once upon a time in the Maine Woods.... On a bitter cold day in the winter of 1912 near Ross Lake in northern Maine, Si Walsh stepped up to the steering box at the front of the…

Making maple syrup and protecting birds that use maple sugarbush as nesting, resting, and foraging habitat can go hand in hand. As a conservation biologist and forester, Steve Hagenbuch knows…

This past June, a team from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst completed an outreach publication focused on the experiences and insights of five rural Black…

Caleb Kenna has been photographing Vermont’s people and landscape for 25 years. In this visual exploration, Kenna spotlights a few of the many waterways that feed into Lake Champlain.…

Dead wood, also called woody debris, woody material, or even necromass, is a normal and natural part of forests. Dead wood takes a number of forms, from dead-standing trees (snags) to twigs…

If you look beneath the damp undersides of cardboard and other packing materials, you’re likely to find tiny creatures that typically hide under fallen leaves and rotting wood, where…

Eight men living with cancer were lined up in the waters of Grand Lake Stream alongside their fishing guides. The swirling, restorative currents of the stream braided together the lives of…

The yellow lampmussel (Lampsilis cariosa) is a freshwater mussel native to medium and large rivers and lakes throughout New England, including the Connecticut River and Housatonic River…

Feathers are the single, universal feature that distinguishes birds from all other creatures in the animal kingdom. These wondrous structures, among nature’s strongest and most durable…