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…
Blog and News
Freezing Time
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…
Winter Woods Savvy Quiz
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…
A Professor and a Practitioner
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,…
Living on the Edge
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…
Baby, It’s Cold Outside
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…
Our Common Home
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…
Playing Possum
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…
’Tis the Season
It’s sales season on Christmas tree farms and, borrowing from Dave Mance’s “Dispatches from the Sugarwoods” that regularly appear in this space during the spring,…
Dispatch from Deer Camp, 2017
Hunting is portrayed idyllically by those who love it – you can see it here in this beautiful PR shot from the Fish and Wildlife department. The eager young lad and the sage mentor,…