Articles

For portions of two days, I watched a red squirrel clipping and caching cones from the crown of a towering white spruce. It was a bumper crop that season, and thousands of cones hung in…

In the early morning of October 8, 2014, an autumn thunderstorm unleashed winds of more than 100 miles per hour as it crossed the western slopes of Mount Tom, a familiar landmark in the…

Elizabeth had been the one person whose opinion, other than Patchett’s own, Patchett had the slightest regard for. On those occasions when Kinneson needed to get his hired man into gear,…

Forest soils certainly benefit from the addition of plant nutrients. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium are the building blocks of leaves, twigs, trunks,…

On a warm August evening at Boston’s Fenway Park, everything had fallen into place by the fifth inning: The Red Sox were beating the Angels 6-0. My pals and I in right field were…

Fall should be a placid time. From my porch I can see ample firewood for this year and next, but it must be natural when you reach a certain age, with most of the adult responsibilities behind…

For 16 years, Adelaide Tyrol has been writing this Outdoor Palette column. Since she’s an accomplished artist in her own right, we thought we’d turn the tables this time and put…

Carbon has gotten a bum rap lately. Once called the fundamental building block of life, it’s now better known as the thing that’s going to destroy the planet. As if this…

Last autumn, at our first writers conference, we set up a table featuring 10 different brands of maple syrup from around New England, New York, and Quebec and encouraged people to pick their…

Fenceposts have always baffled me. Why would anyone take a perfectly good tree, cut it down, dig a hole to set it in, and then spend the next 20 years watching it decay? In my early days of…

Aerial landscape art includes paintings and other visual arts that depict or evoke the appearance of a landscape as it might be viewed by a bird or from an aircraft. This kind of art hardly…

Last fall when acorns were falling out of the oak trees by the thousands, a neighbor said we could expect a hard winter. Presumably the deer needed lots of acorns to last them through the…

Wood has been moved by water for hundreds of years. But these days the quest isn’t to move logs downriver to the mill as much as it is to float them to Pakistan, Vietnam, China, or…

ATV Users and Conservationists Find Common Ground The jagged spit of New Hampshire’s Coos County reaches north to Canada, with Vermont at its western border, Maine to the east, and the…

In November 12, 2014, an unmanned European spacecraft by the name of “Philae” landed on a comet named Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) as it was hurtling across the galaxy at a…

A nesting robin was incessantly scolding something that was moving along the length of a downed log. I knelt and studied the area, and soon saw a flash of white, and thereafter the…

The evening was warm, even for August, and the pitcher for the home team Lowell Spinners was having trouble finding the plate. Millions of white mayflies, disoriented by the bright lights of…

Gone are the days when many in the Northeast relied on pitch pine, and in many cases, gone are the trees themselves. But you can still find this historic tree with the alligator-scale-like…

My walking up here is a form of yoga practice, I suppose – call it the practice of being perfectly content. I’m descending today, down a steeply sloping ridge on the eastern-most…

An Illustrated Introduction to Some of our Region’s Turtles Turtles are rock stars in the animal world, noteworthy not because they’re pretty, but because they’re weird…