Blog and News

The 2016 Northern Woodlands Conference, sponsored by the Bailey Charitable Foundation and The Trust for Public Land, brought together a great group of participants and speakers for a weekend…

I love gnarly trees, and one of the gnarliest I’ve seen is located on the back corner of my central Vermont property. It’s a monstrous maple, sitting on a wide, burly base with…

We’d torn a burner out of an old hot water heater and suspended it with wire beneath a hastily welded angle iron table; it formed a sort of makeshift stove. Then we set the whole thing…

If you’re into nature and writing, which you probably are if you’re into us, then you probably heard the news a few years back that the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed a bunch of…

Eric Hanson, a biologist for the Vermont Loon Conservation Project, will give a natural history talk at this year’s Northern Woodlands Conference. The Loon Conservation Project is a…

I was editing a piece the other day on mourning warbler songs, and learned that males who live in different parts of the country sing differently. The variations might sound subtle to you and…

In a world where the natural environment is usually categorized as land or water, a swamp manages to be both. Deer and ducks, mink and mollusks, dogwoods and cattails all coexist in a rich…

I’ve been trying to explain capitalism and free market economics to a teenager over the past few years, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, and Bernie Sanders, and the teenager having to…

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,…