Blog and News

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…

We were on the ice by 6:30, loaded for bear with tip-ups, axes, augers, bait fish, cooking implements and the likes, the three of us heading out across a virgin snowpack on a lake that seemed…

In mid-December, a delegation from the Vermont Forestry Division and the Agency of Agriculture traveled to Quebec to meet with emerald ash borer (EAB) specialists immersed in the Carignan…

“The vast commercial enterprise and history of logging in Vermont seems like a hidden powerhouse without the public face (and attendant sympathy) that agriculture has here. My hope is that…

For years, frustrated log-truck drivers in Vermont have struggled with arcane federal weight limits on interstate highways. The weight limits kept log trucks off the interstates, and instead…

After a pathetic November that featured weather straight out of an Al Gore picture, winter proper came to the Northern Forest this week. Here again was December snow – the kind people…

It’s not uncommon for pictures of hunter-killed buck deer to show up in my email inbox; what was strange about this case was the title of the email: antlered doe. As you can see from the…

Consult any deer camp journal and you’ll read that each year camp is “opened” the Friday before hunting season, as in: “11-13-09 Joe opened camp around 10 A.M..”…

While sawtimber mills and markets continue to struggle, the fuelwood portion of the forest economy is growing slowly. Recent good news out of Maine has it that International WoodFuels plans to…

“Thanks for coming with me,” said Trev. “Sorry we couldn’t close the deal.” His voice was tired then, and a touch disappointed. He was thinking wistfully about the four straight days…

Moose are arguably the most novel of all North American large mammals, if for no other reason than their strange appearance. Whereas deer and elk are handsome creatures, rams majestic, and…

On September 25, Lora Nielsen, our Administrative Coordinator, attended the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine. What follows is her report. There’s nothing like a country fair on a crisp,…

Dwight Garner wrote an entertaining book review in the New York Times recently on Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s new book: The Hidden Lives of Deer. You can read it online at The Books of…

As a thirty-something year old guy who came of age in the boom years of the 1990s, I’ve been bombarded with advertising pretty much since the day I was born. That I grew up in a small town…

On calendars and on magazine covers, autumn is usually rendered glossy and exhilarating: the foliage always neon orange against azure skies, humans and their fall chores the cheerful…

If we could afford to do it, we’d make the Letters to the Editor section of the magazine 20 pages long. Our readers are the lifeblood of our publication, and their thoughts add depth and…

Managing Editor Dave Mance is on vacation this week, so I hijacked his blog . . . -Lora Nielsen, Administrative Coordinator Our dog Ruby was a 9-year-old speckled black and white Dalmatian mix…

The trail up Burnt Rock Mountain in north-central Vermont is a consistently rugged scramble up exposed granite ledge, the kind that makes ribbons out of hiking boots. J and I summited around 1…