Blog and News

Soon we’ll talk shop. But first, a typical early-season evening. It’s February 19, late afternoon, and I’m in the Hall bush, so named for the family who owns the land and…

In the old days, when most people were farmers, the deep cold months were spent working wood. Maybe you logged the back 40 for income, maybe you just put up 50 cords to burn in your drafty,…

Eastern cottontail rabbits are frequently described as crepuscular, meaning active at dawn and dusk. The Virtual Nature Trail at Penn State New Kensington, an online site documenting various…

The anchors on the early morning television news were discussing Groundhog Day this morning; the weatherman suggesting that the groundhog might see his shadow, the peppy young anchors cheering…

Every winter, as part of a general effort to raise funds for our nonprofit (and amuse ourselves), we put together a Woods Savvy Quiz: a tricky multiple choice test that refers back to content…

Irwin Post, a longtime contributor and friend of the magazine, passed away last Sunday. Professionally speaking he held a lot of titles: forest engineer, consulting forester, logger, sawyer,…

Many wild animals have a fondness for edge habitat, but foxes especially so. It could be the edge of a meadow, or a lake, or the transition where one forest type meets another. These areas…

Back in the late 1990s I had a friend who had a dog who hated Teletubbies – those large, fuzzy creatures that were part of a once-popular kid’s television show. Now, how could a…

I was raised Catholic and followed the protocol closely up through Confirmation and into my teenage years before I lapsed. My current relationship with the Church is like the one you might…

When I was about age 10, Mrs. Garvey assigned an essay to read on opossums. Never mind that we lived 3,000 miles from the nearest actual opossum; I was 10 and one did not question the logic of…