Articles

On September 1, Steve Long will be leaving Northern Woodlands for a fellowship at Harvard Forest. Long founded the magazine with Virginia Barlow, and served as editor and executive director…

The beat changed more, and now they flew striking all together, so that their wings sung in unison as they went over his head. He stood stock still watching them, and long after they had…

To fell trees accurately and safely, you need to know how to do a bore cut, sometimes known as a plunge cut. On trees with forward lean, the traditional “race to the hinge” backcut will…

It is a monumental decision in the life of any birdwatcher. At stake is nothing less than the pleasure you get in the company of birds. So here is some advice on buying and using binoculars.…

Biologists monitor the vitality of the “living symbol of the Maine woods.” The past two days have been disappointing for state bear biologists, and today is shaping up no…

Dick Lewis, of Chester, New Hampshire, has been logging since he was a teenager in the late 1950s. He started with horses and then a farm tractor, each of them pulling a scoot, a rugged sled…

Significant powerline projects are in the works throughout northern New England and New York, as the grid is updated to accommodate more power from Quebec. In the pages of the local papers,…

It’s a still, misty afternoon in Westminster, Vermont, and low-angled sun rays are piercing the water droplets, making everything seem preternaturally bright. Tom Wessels pulls on his boots…

October 14, 2009. Jim Block captured the transition from autumn to winter from the fire tower atop Smarts Mountain in Lyme, New Hampshire.

Even those who say they don’t know the first thing about trees are likely to appreciate the fact that giant trees emerge from tiny seeds. Really, what sort of grump doesn’t smile at the…

In 2010, the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences conducted a study for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to examine the greenhouse gas implications of using woody biomass for energy.…

I took a kid fishing recently. A friend’s kid – a ten-year-old boy who didn’t grow up rural. We cast rooster tails and panther martins into a tea-colored lake that sat up on the…

The shock of crimson from a red maple growing at the edge of a wetland, the spying of a kettle of broadwings flying south, the evocative sound of a katydid suggesting that a return to school…

In Teale's 1956 book Autumn Across America he refused to see leaf fall as a sad occasion, but bear in mind that he wrote this book as he was travelling across the country, not standing at…

In the fall of the year, in almost any rural locale in the northeast, you are likely to hear an apocryphal tale about the unschooled recent arrival from down-country and his tamaracks. The…

What do loggers and moneylenders have in common? When is a lumberer a lumberjack? And what the heck is a lumber room? The answers to these questions are intertangled and ancient, and can be…

A century ago, northern New England was a mess. Its forests were cut over and burned out, and the remaining stands were a mere remnant of the wooded expanse that once sheltered native peoples…

Water power. Our ancestors, those stalwart souls who headed off into the wilderness to build new settlements, depended on it. They dammed streams and rivers to power the mills that were…

Some chainsaw chains are designed to minimize the reactive force known as kickback. These chains are found on a wide range of chainsaws made for homeowners, arborists, and loggers and are…

Color, music, grace, and flight mingle in the lives of most birds. But no bird, at least here in the Northeast, pulls it off like a warbler. Warblers are in a family called Parulidae, known…