Articles

Black cherry, Prunus serotina Black cherry grows in many different situations: among white pine on abandoned farmland, with red maple on poor sites, and scattered among northern hardwoods in…

Since the dawn of history, humans have made great use of leather. They’ve worn it, walked on it, sat on it, wrote on it. Turning animal skin into a durable product requires processing, and…

Anyone who reads the papers knows how badly the prices of stocks, houses, and mutual funds have done since the market peaks of a few years ago. If you don’t sell stumpage very often, you…

There is only one place Christina Hazelton, founder of the Upper Valley Reptile Group, likes to see a red-eared slider paddling by an Eastern painted turtle: on the shelf at her…

The Backstory In May 1949, shortly after the end of World War II, Martin Lindauer, a biologist at the University of Munich, happened upon a swarm of bees hanging in a bush outside the Munich…

A strong voice for our forests went quiet when Mike Greason died on March 8. Mike had a passion for forestry that invariably entered into any conversation with him. Sure, he had all sorts of…

Bees tend to visit only one kind of flower on a given trip, but as you can clearly see in this honeycomb, the different colored pollen from different colored flowers gets a bit mixed up in storage.

Everybody knows that tree species vary in their ability to tolerate shade. It’s easy to find shady places in the woods where shade-tolerant species such as American beech and eastern hemlock…

It’s mid-May as I write this, on an evening that feels like the transition between spring and summer. Outside, the soggy air smells like dead worms and hyacinth and freshly split birch. The…

Five years ago, we published the first edition of our Place You Call Home series: The Place You Call Home: A Guide to Caring for Your Land in the Upper Valley. The idea behind the publication…

Chances are you remember where you were when you saw your first bobcat. Maybe the moment seemed haunted, the cat little more than a ghostly flash of cinnamon and yellow in a spruce thicket,…

In her 1905 book, Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them: A Popular Study of Their Habits and Their Peculiarities, Harriet Keeler extols the unexpected qualities of the inner bark of…

It’s not unusual for landowners in this part of the world to find themselves on one side of a wet area with a need to get to the other side. This can be a vexing problem. Boggy areas often…

The black-capped chickadee may be the perfect songbird. It is vocal and approachable, inquisitive and dependable. Even the casual birdwatcher finds in the chickadee a neighbor, a friend, an…

Melissa Fierke’s journey to becoming assistant professor of forest entomology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, began when the former loan officer…

Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. —Henry…

Silk-spinning spiders have been around for roughly 400 million years, and they’ve made good use of their time. Today, they occupy just about every habitable region of the Earth. Scientists…

“There is but one tree in the pasture,and [the cows] are all collected and now reposing in its shade… It shows the importance of leaving trees for shade in the pastures as well as…

In southern Appalachia, they still call brook trout the “hemlock trout” because they’re mainly found in the cold water and deep shade of the hemlock forest. These spectacularly colorful…

Sugarmakers begin drilling holes and hammering spouts into their maple trees at their own discretion, and each has particular schedules and reasons for tapping when they do. Still, the…