Articles

Last night was clear and I drove into the game lands above Tipton to where the reservoir sits halfway up the mountain. The sky opens there into a wide bowl, far from the artificial light…

By late fall of 2017, I was suffering from slingshot finger. It was caused by routinely firing off an 8-foot version of the weapon traditionally wielded by fiendish little kids. I’d…

A magnificent 92-mile-long ribbon of interconnected lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams flowing through the heart of Maine’s vast northern forest, the Allagash Wilderness Waterway (AWW)…

AFTER THE STORM After the storm they venture out, she and the big black dog who breaks trail with broad chest cresting through virgin white. He pauses with lolling tongue and steaming breath…

Frozen Time: “A drop of water hanging from this twig was twisted by the winds blowing through the forest in Manchester Center, Vermont, as the temperature rapidly dropped, forming an…

Fans of Northern Woodland’s monthly Reader Photo Gallery may recognize the name Charlie Schwarz, a regular contributor to the gallery. A retired forester and lifelong naturalist, Charlie…

Harper, a great blue heron (Ardea herodias), could win a prize for endurance. This fall, after leaving her post-breeding area in Pointe-à-la-Croix, Quebec, Harper flew 68 hours nonstop…

Community engagement in nature and art takes many forms. A two-decade effort to restore a healthy meadow to an urban forest in Worcester, Massachusetts, also brought a college campus and a…

“I am a passionate painter focused on representing both seen and unseen elements of the environment.” — Bunny Harvey Bunny Harvey knows her environment intimately; she knows…

The sky islands of Appalachia – that phrase from a place miles away captured my imagination as I read Sonia DeYoung’s story on page 52. Her research with the University of Vermont…

After this issue of the magazine goes to print, I’m looking forward to some quiet time outdoors. I suspect many people feel as I do right now – weary of news of any kind, and eager…

A hundred years ago the black cherry tree in the gully behind our house on Cliff Street sprouted in a hillside pasture. It hasn’t moved, but the village has crept up the hill and the…

At some point Great Blue Herons learn to fly. It must be interesting to see them jump off a 50’ perch for the first time. There are no pilot instructors or safety nets below. You just…

Rumbles of thunder have grown distant, and the pea-size raindrops that were slamming my face a short time ago have dwindled to a mist. With the rain easing, I notice trickles of water running…

During mating season, between March and May, mature male wild turkeys, also called toms and gobblers (for the loud, gurgling sound they make), strut in an effort to entice nearby hens into…

Forty minutes before sunrise on a cold April morning, I turn onto a rural road in northwest Rhode Island, get out of my car, and listen for four minutes. I hear distant traffic noise, an…

It is often a fluke, some twist of fate, that changes history. In the case of Dartmouth’s Second College Grant, it was a timber theft that initiated nearly 200 years of logging activity…

Just past dawn in the fourth month of what an exhausted Italian doctor on the BBC pronounced the Plague of Corona, I looked out the kitchen window to see a very large fox standing on a…

With the invasive Emerald Ash Borer expanding its range in New England, ash trees are facing an existential threat. In central Maine, where the Wabanaki tribes have long practiced the art of…

George Washington Sears wrote for Forest & Stream (now Field & Stream) magazine under the pen name Nessmuk, a tribute to his Narragansett Indian childhood mentor who taught him…