Articles

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…

If you peer into the waters of a vernal pool in early spring, you may see the eggs of several amphibian species that use this special habitat to reproduce. But which eggs belong to which…

Approximately 50 people contribute to the words and images in each issue of the magazine. Here are some of our Spring 2023 contributors. {image2} Conrad Baker (“Autism Nature…

Until we began working on this issue of the magazine, I had no idea that spotted salamanders are individually distinguishable by their spots. But they are, and what you see below are five…

Readers often express interest in forests’ capacity to absorb and store carbon, and in climate-friendly management practices. In this first installment of a four-part series supported by…

On my family’s 80-acre Christmas tree farm in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom was a large swamp populated by northern white cedar trees. The swamp was at the base of Mount Monadnock,…

Carolyn Egeli is a painter’s painter. As the daughter of two successful artists, she was classically trained at home from a young age, as were her four siblings. But Egeli notes that for…

in memory of George MacArthur I stared at a lone white cedar this morning, astonished, so few of that height and girth left standing from when they were hewn by hand for railroad ties by…

Winter rambles often take me to East Woods in South Burlington, Vermont. While birders gaze skyward, I find myself drawn to movement on the ground. Snow cover reduces invertebrate numbers, and…

Just east of Lake Ontario and west of the Adirondacks lies the Tug Hill Plateau, a chunk of sedimentary rock that rises from an elevation of 250 feet at its base near the lake to 2,100 feet on…

Rising to an elevation of 6,288 feet, Mount Washington caps New Hampshire’s Presidential Range and is the highest peak in the Northeast. On a clear summer day, hordes of visitors flock…

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…