Knots and Bolts

Poplar (also called aspen) buds are an important winter food source for many species of wildlife, but particularly for the ruffed grouse. During the course of a year, a ruffed grouse may feed…

If you spend time foraging, you can’t help but be aware of how abundant – and yet, how ephemeral – food can be on the landscape. This is true any time of year, but especially…

Years ago, when I was on the Yale campus for a half-year teaching gig, my colleague Yajie Song called and asked, “How’d you like to go to China?” My immediate response was,…

The group of fungi known as stinkhorns are aptly named, as their foul odor is easy to detect. All stinkhorns first appear as egg-shaped structures that can be up to two inches high. When the…

Turning acorns, walnuts, wild rice, and other autumn staples into food requires time, tools, and expertise. For weekend foragers used to picking berries and greens, this labor can make autumn…

There are around a dozen wild plants in the Northeast known as thistles, and while most belong to several related genera, they vary greatly. Some are tall; some are short. Most have purple…

Dawn on a mild spring morning: the colors of the sky change from dark blue to an orange-and-purple hue. Dew covers the grass and turns into layers of fog as the temperature rises. Turkeys are…

When it comes to ingenuity, the golden tortoise beetle (Charidotella sexpunctata) larva has all others beat. Instead of discarding its feces, it collects them to use as a means of chemical…

We flew into Anchorage on a late-July evening. Our first stop the next morning was at an enormous Cabela’s store to buy red-pepper spray to repel any charging bears we might encounter.…

Every spring, tiny, delicate blue butterflies known as spring azures (Celastrina ladon) are among the first butterflies to be seen in the Northeast. The appearance of this butterfly depends on…

We moved to Georgetown, New York, in 1999 after I was discharged from the Marine Corps. A family member had purchased property there but was living in another state; he wanted a caretaker and…

Most nature documentation these days is done electronically through the submission of sightings and photographs. But in earlier times, it frequently meant collecting and cataloging actual…

Everyone knows dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), and everyone, it seems, has an opinion about them. Loved by children. Reviled by owners of suburban lawns. Dandelions just evoke strong…

My nine-month-old daughter and I look out our living room window. I point at the marsh below. “See the beaver?” I whisper. Through a tight waterway, a beaver swims. “What…

The Fen is a private wildlife reserve in northeastern Connecticut. The 30-acre parcel was purchased in the spring of 2016 by Bet and Patrick Smith; here, Bet, who has a master’s degree…

Foragers gravitate toward the margins – hedgerows, roadsides, the shallow waters at the edge of a pond or lake, and the unkempt boundaries between woods and lawn. The forager’s…

While most insects in the Hemiptera order are land-dwelling (including stink bugs and assassin bugs), a few, such as these backswimmers, are aquatic. In the fall, when most insect hatches have…

In January, I found myself preparing for a reindeer round-up with a Finnish family in Jääskö, one of the 54 herding districts in Lapland, Finland. We were fortunate that the…

Editor’s Note: What follows is the first in a series of pieces that imagines what the Northern Forest would be like if history had unfolded in a different way. Experts estimate that…

The Northern Forest Region contains about 265 species of woody plants. About a third, the generalists, are common in much or all of the region. Another third, the ecological specialists, are…