Blog and News

The first red squirrel appeared at about 50 mph. It climbed up over my headrest and landed in my lap. I don’t recall the next few seconds very clearly, but according to my 5-year-old…

Transition zones are attractive to many mammals, so we set this camera trap up on an edge where a stand of spruce met a stand of maple. Over the next few nights we captured images of skunks,…

Well it’s been a quiet month in my home town, out there in the valley of Vermont. Weather-wise, we’ve seen just about everything but a good soaking rain. There were a few days when…

Now that the weather has improved, I’ve been out on my bike more. A couple years ago I wrote a blog about the wildlife you can see from your bike seat, and how this quiet mode of travel…

Human life can, at times, seem chaffingly structured. We rise at the same time every day and make little daily migrations to the same building; come home and make dinner at 7, an act…

I am walking backwards in the woods, wearing a bicycle helmet, and experiencing an intense surge of cowardice. In one of my hands is a stick. On top of that stick, held aloft like a knightly…

It was a gray May day, and at the town forest in Fairlee, Vermont, a patchcut hummed with industrious students and volunteers. At the base of the hill teenagers plucked trees off a…

May is turkey season in the Northeast, a time when the sight and sound of a strutting tom is sure to stir a bird hunter’s heart. In this series of photos, a hot tom dances with himself.…

With respect to Donald Trump (and without making a partisan political statement), I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. A perfect…

If you’re new to forest management, it might be tempting to think that forestry is a pretty simple affair. There’s a book out there that tells you what a good stocking level is.…

I recently visited my family’s riverside farm in Virginia, where we’re a few years ahead of the Northeast in terms of eagle and osprey recovery from DDT (the “Silent…

While pulling taps the other day I was marveling at some big trees in our sugarbush – the largest is the 50-incher you see here. To think that it started its life competing with…

One of the first steps to understanding animal behavior is to recognize that many species interact with the world through their noses. Beavers are a prime example. Once they establish a…

Our farm bush shut down in early March, but the Hall bush is higher elevation and north facing and is still producing. We sold the sap we collected last week to a sugarmaker up the road, and…

In winter, camera trapping gets both harder and easier. The challenges include short days that limit the opportunity for color daytime photos, cold temperatures that can tax equipment, and a…

I boiled for 14 hours the other day, and in between draws and fire-loadings read a column by David Brooks in The New York Times about marriage. He said that people tend to view the institution…

We boiled our first sap of the year on February 21, and once it started, it ran pretty consistently until last Wednesday. By March 1 we’d made half a crop; we’re now at about 60…

This is my fifth year writing a sugaring journal for this editor’s blog, and one of the nice things about having a written record of an annual event is that you can go back and check…

Editor's note: This blog is by our friend Janet Pesaturo, a writer, educator, and CyberTracker certified wildlife tracker. Check out her wildlife tracking programs here. Foxes are…

This past autumn, Northern Woodlands circulated a “woods savvy” quiz, with the promise to announce the winners today. The quiz featured 10 multiple choice questions, and we had a…