Blog and News

Most jobs involve deadlines – periods of high stress interspersed with moments of relative calm. But since an editor’s job involves assembling words and pictures to produce a kind of…

My birddog, Woody, figured it all out last night. He’s a 6-year-old English cocker, bred to find and flush birds. Unfortunately, I just haven’t hunted with him enough in the last few years…

As we age, we get smarter but we feel dumber, one of those human condition quirks that poets are always pondering. Country singers from Kenny Rodgers on up have lamented the ignorance of youth…

The open road – the notion of high adventure just over the county line – holds a special place in the American imagination. Media types are especially drawn to the idea, as we’re…

My friend Kris and I met in Mrs. Kevorkian’s kindergarten class, which means I’ve been a bad influence on him for almost thirty years now. When I suffer from panic attacks brought on by…

If you haven’t already received your autumn issue of Northern Woodlands you should get it any day now. When friends ask me how I think the issue turned out, I tell them that I don’t know…

At this time of year, honeybees fly in and out of their hive in such numbers that on a sunny day there’s danger of a log jam at the entrance, as some bees scramble to get out to forage and…

I spent part of yesterday on my belly at the base of a tree with a knife and a length of wire in my hand. I was trying to kill something. The tree was an apple, a Cox’s Orange Pippin to be…

Editor’s Note: Walter Medwid, the Executive Director of Northern Woodlands, is on blog duty this week. Before joining the team at Northern Woodlands, I served as Executive Director at…

The spin doctors on either side of the bioenergy divide have been hard at work spinning a recently released study on biomass sustainability into whatever the PR equivalent of gold is. A few…

Do you remember how wet it was last summer, and how we were all wondering about the affect of the rain on the forest? (If not, refresh your memory with this 2009 blog, where we ponder the…

As I’m writing this, a bill that would ban felt-soled waders is sitting on Vermont Governor Jim Douglas’s desk. If he signs it – and there’s no indication that he won’t –…

Have things seemed early to you this year? Early buds? Early peepers? Early trips to the drugstore to buy Claritin? Turns out your hunch is accurate, at least about the buds and the Claritin.…

It’s not often that we’re presented with an editorial angle that lets us segue into the world of sports, but the rising furor over maple bats in baseball presents just such an…

I’ve put in my time in the invasives war: digging wild chervil, clipping buckthorn, hacking at Japanese knotweed. I’ve been reasonably relentless, and many times have pointed out these bad…

Unlike cartoon springtime, which is lush and instant – a character in a doorway rubbing his eyes while flowers unfurl and bluebirds sing – real life springtime is reserved, somber,…

The act of tapping a tree can be a mystical experience. The tree, so often just a drab giant in the landscape, a taken-for-granted piece of architecture, little different than a house or a…

A friend of the magazine contacted me recently with a deceptively simple question: how do I know when to start tapping my maple trees? The literal answer, “whenever you can take time off…

I knew very little about Haiti before the tragic recent earthquake brought the county to the front pages of the local paper. I still know very little, although I’m learning, slowly. To…

Each time we send out a newsletter, maybe 300 people look at the What in The Woods is That picture, between 50 and 100 regularly venture guesses, and about a half dozen send us in-depth…