Articles

While on an afternoon hike last fall, I sat down at the base of a large tree to take in what might be going unnoticed. Within seconds, a chipmunk appeared from behind a pile of large rocks.…

Never mind the dreaded news at the dentist’s office – cavities are good! Dead, broken-topped snags full of large and small cavities aren’t worth anything at the mill.…

We were maybe 10 minutes down the trail when Nancy Sferra made the announcement. “We’re now officially in old growth.” A few steps had taken us from one type of forest, a…

Dana Ceccarelli photographed this bark-stripped log on the bank of the Wells River in Vermont last autumn. “It has been there for many years – submerged in some seasons, exposed in…

Now is a favorite time for family campfires up on our hill. The cricket chirps are slowing, the asters are feeding the last of the bees. Behind us, the woods edge crackles with flutters and…

“It’s like loving someone with a terminal disease,” she said, her long, thin fingers brushing the tree’s rivulet bark. Our daughter’s in a front pack on her…

"Light is the most important person in the picture." Claude Monet, 1840-1926 founder of French Impressionism For the painter Claude Monet, the effects of light on a subject were as…

Betsy Lesnikoski loved being outdoors as a child in Connecticut in the 1970s, but given her suburban surroundings, she wasn’t sure how to turn that passion into a career. When she…

Ethan Pond, a small pond high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, is not only where a trout-fishing addiction began for me, but it’s also where some of the earliest observations of…

Forests are complex systems. The Earth’s climate is a complex system. When you put them together, you get something even more complex. Complexity upon complexity, as it were. It’s…

Jens Hilke, a conservation planning biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood beside his colleague, James Brady, a biologist with the Vermont Agency of Transportation…

A regular chore of mine is to dispose of the mice and moles trapped in our home. I place them on a 4 x 5-foot patch of dirt and rock – which I have named the grave site – beside my…

His assignment was to train gauchos to be loggers. That’s what the Peace Corps hoped Brett Chedzoy would accomplish in Argentina in the 1990s. “I wasn’t too…

Walking in the New Hampshire woods, I mark my trail with eau de DEET. Chickadees twitter judgmentally in the hemlocks: “She’s wearing the CDC-recommended, permethrin-impregnated…

By late May, we are cheered by the melodious songs of birds – birds which, at this time of year, are busy building nests, guarding them, and soon caring for their newborn occupants. But…

Photographer Jim Block got this striking shot of an American bittern thanks to a bit of serendipity. “During a group hike on the Sunapee-Ragged-Kearsarge Greenway Trail 6, I learned…

Recently, I mused to a colleague that I wished we had tables sized for our new meeting room. We’re starting to implement an ambitious three-year plan to extend the educational reach of…

On the western side of Vermont, the Otter Creek wanders leisurely through hayfields before easing into Lake Champlain. Wildlife abounds, with shore-nesting bald eagles and ospreys,…

The canoe scraped noisily onto the gravel bar on the point of one of the great bends in the northern Connecticut River. I’ve stopped to see a remnant of the floodplain forest that once…

Growing up, I spent many summer afternoons along the banks of a local canal snatching painted turtles as they basked on fallen logs. For many of us, turtles are the gateway animals that start…