Blog and News

I went to a group-think exercise the other day where participants were asked to envision what the landscape in Vermont would look like 40 years from now under various scenarios. It was my…

We see a lot of game camera pictures of deer, bear, moose – the big charismatic animals that people love. And so to be different we wanted to camera trap an otter, an animal that’s…

Like a lot of kids who grew up rural, I was introduced to many of the wonders of nature through hunting. Specifically squirrel hunting, which is how most kids get their start. I don’t do…

Mr. Trefry was my seventh grade industrial arts teacher and an avid fisherman. He showed me how to cast lead jigs, which I used over the years to catch a pile of perch. Trefry was paranoid…

Welcome to the new Northern Woodlands Game Camera blog! We were inspired by all the great game camera pictures readers have sent us over the years, so we got two game cameras of our own and…

Spend time in northern Maine, and you’ll likely get an earful of two seemingly incompatible complaints. The first is the scarcity of jobs. The shuttering of the Verso mill in Bucksport…

G and I were out for a walk the other night, talking about and wondering why the sky has been so beautiful for the last month. Evening after evening of just impossible grandeur. Every night…

We’re doing a big story on white pine blister rust in the Autumn issue, and in tracking down art for the piece came across a cool old type-written report on eastern white pine that was…

The birch bark peelers arrived in a pickup pulling a covered trailer. There was a 4-wheeler in it, a smaller trailer, and sheets of cardboard and stickers for the bark. They unloaded the…

I went on vacation this past week down to southern Massachusetts, a place that’s really a different world to a guy from Vermont: the land flat or gently rolling towards the sea; the…

I’ve been trying to line things up to build a house for a few years now, and am getting nowhere fast. I’ve made some recent progress milling hardwood, though, that I’ll…

It’s often implied, if it’s not said outright, that nature is a cruel, cold place. We’ve all seen trees wrapped around each other fighting for light; late frosts that leave…

I went to a tick talk last night in southwestern Vermont that was sponsored by Bennington College and the Bennington County Sustainable Forestry Consortium. Kathleen LoGiudice, a researcher…

You do this job long enough and you turn into Andy Rooney, I’ve decided, which is to say that you slowly become some crotchety old guy who gets mad at the news and wants to tell everyone…

We boiled for the last time this season last Saturday – a raw, cold day. It froze hard that night, but Sunday rose up into the 60s. It felt like the end of sugaring season and the first…

There’s still an element of magic in sugaring, still plenty of things we don’t understand. Take how weather relates to a run. The book says you need a freeze-thaw cycle to build…

So we got our first run the end of last week, and made our first syrup on March 14. That was also the day we finally finished tapping, thanks in large part to our friends Ginny and Court who…

We usually start tapping our sugarwoods around February 1. This year it was five below zero that morning, and so there was no rush getting out there. If it’s too cold when you tap, you…

One of the biggest criticisms of the media these days is that it’s objective to a fault. Consider the flack some editors have taken recently for giving equal time to both sides of the…

This winter, a barred owl has been loitering around my house. My husband arbitrarily declared it a male (there’s no easy way to sex an owl) and we dubbed him Squinty McBold.…