Articles

Let’s face it: trees are better off in the woods. Although forest trees – like their more urban counterparts – face many threats to growth and survival, at least in the woods…

Last year, May first was about as nice a spring day as you could ask for. Dawn broke cool, maybe a touch of frost in the cold spots, but the sky was high – just blue jay blue – and…

For all the time we spend watching birds during the breeding season, rarely do we get to see birds actually breeding. That’s because avian copulation usually lasts only seconds. Birds…

When snow drifts linger into late April and freezing rain challenges new blossoms, mother bears and their infant cubs seek out wetland edge habitats. Seepage areas and vernal pools, as well as…

One irony of ancient forests and wilderness areas – known for their absence of human imprint – is that their names conjure up associations with people. In the Sierras, the Mariposa…

After the leaves fall in October, the mountains that rise toward the Canadian border north of Jackman, Maine, begin to wear their maple like a fuzzy, gray wool blanket. Sugar and red maple are…

In Fairlee, Vermont, there’s a 540-acre stretch of former glacier called Lake Morey. If a loon on that lake pointed his bill northwest, flew straight as the idiomatic crow, and kept…

Fifteen years ago, on its centennial anniversary, The National Audubon Society recognized 100 “Champions of Conservation” in the twentieth century. All are individuals who have…

Three tom turkeys vie for the attention of one hen. If puffed out feathers, red wattles, fanned tails and lowered wings don’t win her over, a repertoire of nonvocal “hums”…

Some of the timberland my family owns abuts state forest. On our side of the property line is a thoroughly ordinary mix of beech, red maple, and white pine. Mixed age, but pretty young; the…

Log truckers have nothing to haul if loggers aren’t cutting wood, and the rain this past summer kept loggers out of the woods for weeks at a time. Don Moore, Jr., a log truck operator…

We carefully rolled the big spruce log with our peaveys, and it settled into place with a thunk, fitting almost perfectly over the log beneath it. A little fine tuning with axe and chisel and…

It’s late afternoon, and fine snow is sifting down into Joan and Bill Hildreth’s woods in Montgomery, Vermont. Their property lies within a large expanse of forest on the edge of…

“They had to leave the hollies,” Brian Tefft said, pointing across an opening studded with snow-touched slash to a pair of green-bowered bluebirds. “That was one…

A tree’s growth is based, in part, on competition from its neighbors. Its first priority is to gain access to the sun, and in a forest up is the only way to go. (An open grown tree will…

It is difficult to describe the Theology of Birds to which I am devoted, except to compare it to what Emerson said of his own spiritual condition: “It is always fully felt but ever only…

It is an aster in winter, sun through the clouds – a force of nature called the yellow-rumped warbler. Find its buttery warmth even when life outside seems to groan or crunch or crack…

In the frosty, pre-dawn darkness, three friends and I pulled off on a lonely stretch of road in Windham County, Vermont. The aging Subaru had bumped and heaved over the frozen ruts. We…

Thomas Crotty, a Massachusetts native, moved to Maine in 1964, drawn by the power and beauty of its coastal landscape. At the solo retrospective of his work at the Portland Museum of Art, then…

Of all the silvicultural techniques available to forest owners, perhaps no method is more underused than coppicing. Coppicing is a reproduction method where a tree is cut back periodically to…