Blog and News

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

This picture of an amazingly ambitious golden eagle was taken in West Virginia and submitted by Brian Kain to biologist Kevin Oxenrider, who then submitted it to Todd Katzner, who works for…

One of our regular magazine contributors sent me this email this week: An awful thing happened this weekend here in Plainfield. I was walking in the fields near my house with my little dog…

This past weekend, Northern Woodlands held its 4th annual conference, a gathering of over 140 writers, editors, readers, foresters, educators, artists, scientists, naturalists, and others who…

It’s probably safe to assume that most readers of this magazine are well aware that firewood needs to be reasonably dry before it’s burned, and that it’s a pain to move, so…

Like a lot of hunters, I keep tabs on the deer around our camp with trail cameras that are left up year-round. This particular four-day window presents a couple of nice, teachable moments…

A writer who’d recently had a piece of writing rejected by a magazine once told me that the experience was like walking into an interview and being asked: “I’m thinking of a…

A Conversation with J.T. Horn of The Trust for Public Land On October 20th, about 140 writers, artists, students, and scientists will gather at the Hulbert Outdoor Center to participate in the…

Harvard Forest released a report last week that’s been grabbing headlines – you can read it here. The big news is that between 1990 and 2010, New England lost 24,000 acres of…

We’ve been rebuilding a major section of one of our sugarbushes this summer with the idea that this time we’re going to do it right. We first started building this particular bush…

For years, as a committed insect ecologist, I resisted student requests to work on mammals. My objections included bite risk, rabies shots, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee forms…

Some months, like some people, have a very strong sense of who and what they are. May is spring. July and August are summer. October is fall. January, February are winter. If these months had…

A co-worker sent me this email the other day: Hi there, a very lovely elderly subscriber just called and he wants to know more about what has happened to the forest industry over the past…