The nature of a quarterly magazine timed to publish with the change of seasons means that I’m writing my column for this Autumn issue during the hottest, muggiest days of summer. The green darners, like the one pictured on our cover, have not yet begun their southward migration. The landscape is as lush and green as it gets, the days have only just begun shortening, and the resident summer birds wake me each morning in a welcome burst of sound.
A reader and new subscriber wrote recently, beseeching us to “please never change.” Change, of course, is as inevitable as the shifting seasons. Now and then, I’ll pluck an older issue of Northern Woodlands from my deskside stash, which stretches back a decade or so, or from our deeper archives tucked away at Northern Woodlands’ headquarters. It’s interesting, and often enlightening, to see what is different and what remains similar through the years.
We sometimes joke about how long our tagline has been “A New Way of Looking at the Forest.” Can we still offer, we wonder, a new way to look at the forest after all these years of Northern Woodlands? I think so. Part of what I love about walking through the forest near my home – in any season – is the familiarity of it. I know the trees that bear scars where they face the old skid road I walk along, which mushrooms are likely to pop up in which spot after it rains, and where the brook swirls under an old, moss-covered bridge and the water is just deep enough for the dog to swim.
Despite this familiarity, I am always looking for something new. An unfamiliar fern or newly bloomed wildflower. An opening in the canopy that wasn’t there last year – and what emerges from the forest floor beneath. A snag that has aged just long enough that the pileated woodpeckers drill a chain of elongated holes in their search for ants. Animal tracks and scat, tree hollows and hidden nests, birdsong and leaf shapes I haven’t yet learned.
Some of our readers, I’m absolutely certain, know more about the forest – and different ways to look at it – than I ever will. Others are just beginning to see the forest for the trees, just starting to look beyond “tree,” “flower,” “bird” to identify “shagbark hickory” (Carya ovata), “sweet everlasting” (Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium), “northern parula” (Setophaga americana) – all featured within the pages of this issue, by the way. And then, perhaps, they’ll begin to look beyond the names and consider how we harvest trees and other things from our forests and the ways we process these to make the items we use, the places we live, and even, sometimes, the food we eat.
Northern Woodlands has evolved and will continue to – not only as contributors and staff shift, but also in response to changes in the forest and the forest products industry. Through the columns and stories within these pages, we strive to shed some light on the work of scientists, to offer enhanced understanding of how our landscapes and our perspectives of the world have changed, and to highlight people moving in the modern world of forests and forestry and forest products.
I think, though, that I understand what our letter writer means when she asks us to never change. One of the things I’ve always loved about Northern Woodlands is that it offers both narrative and scientific writing, graphs and illustrations, data points and photographs. Where else can you learn how to test your chainsaw’s compression and glean facts about the season’s phenology, discover the ways forests contribute to jet fuel and fashion, peruse poetry and scientific studies? You’ll find all of those within the pages of this magazine, and I hope one or two of the things you read here inspire you to look at the forest in a new way.