Articles

Pity the brown creeper. A prisoner of the forest, the creeper seems unable to escape the gravitational pull of the tree trunk on which it creeps, ever upward, gleaning insects, spiders, and…

Thanksgiving 2015, the first since my husband’s death, we climb the hill to offer him the last cider of the season. Our granddaughter pours the libation around the homemade grave, on…

Our brains filter and sort what we see to help us understand things. We edit out a plethora of information in order to clarify and organize the world. Carolyn Enz Hack is interested in the…

“We were exploring a remote wetland within the Brushwood Community Forest in West Fairlee, Vermont,” says Susan C. Morse, who captured this shot. “I was bringing up the rear…

I’m writing this in late January, right about the time that we’re starting the woods work for the coming sugaring season. Ours is a family maple operation that my father and…

Last March, I kept company with a red-breasted nuthatch who hunted insects on a dying sugar maple outside the Northern Woodlands office. My second floor window provided a close-up view of the…

In college, I spent a summer building hand-hewn Adirondack lean-tos. The work required both precision and persuasion. We’d chisel perfect saddle notches, which often meant rolling the…

You’re walking alongside a beaver flowage and encounter large mustelid tracks – a bounding pattern along the bank for more than 100 yards. Then the tracks cross the broad frozen…

In 1995, the Vermont legislature created the wildlife conservation license plate. Now, 20 years later, more than $2.5 million has been raised from the sale of these plates; the money goes to…

“Just after the snow melts away but before the growing season starts, the northwoods is vulnerable to wildfire. As a volunteer firefighter, I was assigned to a crew to extinguish…

In the shadows of a February dawn, not far from the town of Greenville, Maine, wildlife biologist Henning Stabins of Plum Creek Timber Company and his colleagues were in search of Lynx…

Michael Low knows intimately every footstep of his 67-acre Green Fire Farm. He has worked this land for a dozen years, and his wife and business partner, Hart Brent, has been here a decade…

Somehow trees put up with all manner of injury and assault during their lives. They have to: they are rooted in place and cannot move to avoid injury. Whether it’s ice- or wind-stripped…

On a warm, sunny day last spring, just a few weeks before the end of the school year, professional timber framer Makaio Maher stood in a small clearing in a stand of red pine trees in Newport,…

Even among the quirky cast of characters we know as birds, the crossbill is a bit of a freak. It’s hard to decide which is more bizarre: its bill or its breeding behavior. Front and…

This is a story about Adirondack hermits, but the place and time in which it unfolds are as big a part of the tale as anything else. It was the late 1800s, see, and everything in America was…

We did a Google image search of the phrase “Vermont art,” and our computer monitor filled up with paintings of barns, cows, and church steeples. Most were lovely – clearly…

As you read this, please imagine a drum roll, or better yet, the sound of a ruffed grouse whomping the air with its wings. With this issue, the Center for Northern Woodlands Education is…

Most folks know that stream-flow ponds impounded by dams built of sticks, stones, and mud are created by beavers. Conical or dome-shaped lodges surrounded by water are also recognizable signs…

We cut about 10,000 feet of white pine last winter off a little nob in the south end of the sugarbush. This summer we’ve been turning the logs into lumber for the home we’re…