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A decade or so ago, a friend showed me his copy of a book called Make a Chair from a Tree. Now who could possibly resist a title like that? With its step-by-step procedures for making a…

Dawn, in early November: stepping outside, I hear a twittering from on high. Against the brightening sky, I glimpse a small bird with a rounded head and a long, pointed bill. On rapidly…

In the basement of the New Hampshire Fish and Game department’s Concord office, down an industrial gray set of stairs, and through a hallway that smells like an elementary school…

Michael Dirr, my favorite horticulturalist, is a man of strongly held views. Though our tastes don’t always align (one of my favorite plants, Kolkwitzia, “gives him a…

Certainly there’s much to admire about paper birch trees, also known as white birch (Betula papyrifera). Ecologists marvel about how adaptable they are, growing natively over a…

Balsam woolly adelgids (BWA) were first noticed in this country in Brunswick, Maine, in 1908. Like the dreaded hemlock woolly adelgid, this tiny, wingless, introduced insect feeds by inserting…

They are the epitome of avian energy, hovering, darting, and flowing like no other birds, almost as if they weren’t birds at all but rather androids or creatures borne from the sparks of…

Harvard Forest recently produced a report called Wildlands and Woodlands, A Vision for the New England Landscape. The vision calls for a long-term conservation effort that would conserve 70…

Members of the board of directors and the staff of The Center for Northern Woodlands Education met in western Massachusetts this July for a planning retreat focused on change. We discussed…

Like a forest fire that appears to be contained before exploding into an inferno, biomass has gone from being a topic of interest primarily to foresters and energy experts to one that can draw…

My son Seth and I have a tradition. Each summer, we choose a different mountain and a campground near it, pack our gear into my subcompact car, and set off on a father-son adventure. Two…

These prices are for #1 hardwood logs, at least 8 feet long, with three clear faces and a minimum 12-inch top diameter. In the timber world, this is a log of average quality, not a prime…

The primary goal of natural history illustration is scientific accuracy. Since the work is used to educate, it must portray a species with precision and a high level of detail. If it’s…

Mainers like to brag about our lakes and ponds and rivers and streams, and with good reason. We have lots of all of them, and I haven’t met any I didn’t like. Granted, some of our…

Did you know that a chunk of green firewood can be over 50 percent water? Of course you did. You’ve tried to burn that wood, and it was no more combustible than celery. So now you season…

Black bears are built to climb. Their prodigious upper body strength, coupled with a unique skeletal adaptation, enables bears to scurry squirrel-like up tall trees in seconds. The ursid…

Across great distances they migrate, powered on a diet of arthropods and a blast of determination. When they stop to visit, they are among the most watchable of all wildlife, feeding and…

My early knowledge of sassafras brings to mind the legendary blind men describing an elephant. One man touches the tail, another the flank, another the tusk, and in the end, there’s no…

There was a time when people who lived in rural areas and owned acreage made their living from the land. Subsistence living was neither an alternative lifestyle nor a quaint anachronism. It…

Connecticut forester, logger, and all-around woodskeeper Bob Haines abides by two principles: waste not, want not; and take the time to do it right. Haines has an aura of calm thoughtfulness.…