Articles

Tom Shafer’s business is mining trees. It’s not really harvesting; maybe re-harvesting. “Recovering a forgotten forest” is his company motto. He likes to think of it as…

On a crisp, sunny day in September, at the end of what was probably a typical summer for a dragonfly (lots of flying around, killing things, and mating beside a pond), a common green darner…

In the spring of 1976, Bangor, Maine, was preparing for war. Douglas C-54 Skymasters, the same four-engine behemoths used during the Berlin Airlift, sat wing-tip to wingtip on the tarmac of…

Why Do Evergreen Needles Look So Different From Deciduous Leaves? Ask anybody to draw a leaf and damn few would draw a pine, spruce, hemlock, or fir needle, and even fewer would draw the green…

Tracking appeals to us because we enjoy sorting out nature’s subtle clues – clues that lead us to visualize and appreciate the behavior of different wildlife species. Simple tracks…

Maine's Native American basketmakers have brought a tradition back to life. For Jeremy Frey, of Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indian tribe, weaving ash baskets is a family tradition. He…

Growing up, I never got along that well with school, but I always loved to read and especially loved to read hunting stories, which were their own genre back then. Wilson Rawls’ Where…

A maple leaf frozen in time (and ice) near the edge of a small pond in northern New Hampshire. “The blue seen in the shot is the reflection of a cloudless sky,” said Kaczmarek.…

Susan Morse has contributed to this magazine since its early years. One of her first articles appeared in our Winter 1997 issue. The topic was lynx. The opening paragraph mentioned her…

What is the definition of environmental art? The simplest, shortest explanation is that it is art that addresses environmental or ecological concerns. Historically, environmental art grew out…

Wood-splitting is a rural pastime rooted in tradition and experience – experience that’s often measured in broken axe handles and creative curses directed at knotty chunks of…

In Alaska and the more open terrain of northwestern alpine meadows and muskeg habitats, a rutting bull will flash and flag his massive antlers like “social semaphores,” as…

Approximately 8,000 years ago, a period of global warming called the Hypsithermal Interval stimulated timber rattlesnakes to move north from the vicinity of Long Island. They followed river…

At first, Beverly Kaiser and her husband Phillip were pleased when a father-and-son logging team stopped by their house in Washington, Vermont, in late August 2008. Ken Bacon Sr. and Jr. of…

Friends sometimes express surprise when I tell them that I’m a Quaker logger, and that I find logging to be deeply spiritual work. How, they ask, can it possibly be spiritual when…

Forest fragmentation is the breaking of large, contiguous, forested areas into smaller pieces of forest; typically these pieces are separated by roads, agriculture, utility corridors,…

The word mast is of Anglo-Saxon origin, and originally described an abundance of acorns on the forest floor, eagerly devoured by domestic swine. The Old German root meant “to be…

People who fish tend to be poetically inclined – it probably has something to do with the hours spent in silent contemplation. And of all their piscatorial muses, the brook trout reigns…

From his perch high on a balsam fir near a bog in northern Vermont, far from suburbia and barnyards, an American robin sings as if he owns the place. And, in many ways, he does. Although…

“It should be right up here ahead of us,” promised Kevin Martin, his focus alternating between his handheld GPS and the knee-deep water that surrounded us. He was looking for the…