Blog and News

I went deer hunting last week with my friend Bill at his camp in the Adirondacks. The trip over entailed a beautiful ride down Route 28, then a misty boat ride across a frosty lake. The camp…

Here in Vermont there’s an interesting political race going on for governor, and it relates to our subject matter in that the contest might hinge, in some small but possibly significant…

Joe Wheelwright, the sculptor, died on September 28. I met Joe while writing this story about him in 2012. When I heard the news of his passing I went back and read it again; looked at the…

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,…

Well it’s been a quiet month in my home town, out there in the valley of Vermont. Weather-wise, we’ve seen just about everything but a good soaking rain. There were a few days when…

Now that the weather has improved, I’ve been out on my bike more. A couple years ago I wrote a blog about the wildlife you can see from your bike seat, and how this quiet mode of travel…

Human life can, at times, seem chaffingly structured. We rise at the same time every day and make little daily migrations to the same building; come home and make dinner at 7, an act…

I am walking backwards in the woods, wearing a bicycle helmet, and experiencing an intense surge of cowardice. In one of my hands is a stick. On top of that stick, held aloft like a knightly…

It was a gray May day, and at the town forest in Fairlee, Vermont, a patchcut hummed with industrious students and volunteers. At the base of the hill teenagers plucked trees off a…

May is turkey season in the Northeast, a time when the sight and sound of a strutting tom is sure to stir a bird hunter’s heart. In this series of photos, a hot tom dances with himself.…

With respect to Donald Trump (and without making a partisan political statement), I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. A perfect…