Blog and News

Last sugaring season started early, and it lurched like a 16-year-old learning to drive a stick. It was too cold, then too warm, then too cold – that cycle over and over. We made syrup…

Phenology – the study of when things happen in a particular season – is endlessly interesting, but especially so after a long winter, when we’re starved for change. We know…

Have you ever wondered why we start the new year in winter, in the middle of the season of death, instead of in spring, the season of birth? Or instead of in fall, at the peak of…

This past October, we put together a quiz that tested readers’ knowledge of topics we’d covered over the preceding year in Northern Woodlands magazine, The Outside Story weekly…

The Spring issue of Northern Woodlands just reached mailboxes this week, hopefully providing a welcome change of scenery from the wintery conditions outside your window. Among the most hopeful…

Recently, we discovered this barred owl near the Northern Woodlands office – dead, frozen, and wedged in a tree cavity roughly four feet from the ground. The head was pulled back into…

Earlier this winter, Paul Smith College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) published a report on water quality for 21 lakes in Hamilton County. The county occupies the lower, central…

This letter came in to us the other day. To the Editors: By this time, you and many of your Vermont readers have most likely heard the podcast on VPR on wood heat. It was a good and thorough…

Last weekend, there was a tussle in the lilac bush in our front yard, and when the snow settled, what was revealed was one weasel and one very agitated red squirrel. The weasel ducked into the…

I have yet to hear of any snowy owls nearby this winter, although they’re on the move in the Northeast; Cornell’s eBird site includes recent sightings along the New England coast,…

Recently, I’ve been learning about ancient forests. This started when a teacher I met at an educators’ conference gave me a chunk of shale covered in fern fossils from the…

Like a lot of rural kids, my introduction to furbearing animals came through trapping. It’s not an easy endeavor ever – especially when you’re 12 – so the powers of the…

I’m a big proponent of cutting up your own local venison – the local in that phrase used to distinguish between a deer someone shoots near their home and a deer they might take in…

During the first decade of the 20th century, New York Harbor teemed with steamships delivering new arrivals from overseas. Between 1900 and 1910, the Statue of Liberty welcomed an average of…

In the winter issue (arriving in mailboxes any day now), there’s a supernatural tale about a fateful encounter between a logging camp villain and a gorby – one of the many names…

Over the past five years, photojournalist George Bellerose has spent thousands of hours photographing and interviewing loggers and others whose jobs, one way or another, connect to the forests…

This year’s Northern Woodlands Conference, held at the Hulbert Outdoor Center in Fairlee, Vermont, featured a great mix of workshops and presentations, all related, in one way or…

This autumn seems an especially good one for mushrooms. Our September Reader Photo Gallery includes a number of fungi photos, and a one mile walk in my family woodlot this past Sunday revealed…

Many of our setups in this Game Cam Blog series have involved edge habitat – that is, the edge of field and forest, or land and water, or the boundary between two forest types. Such…

Who’s in the woods? In this occasional web series, we check in with members of our tribe to learn a little bit more about the work they’re doing, the life they’re leading.…