Knots and Bolts

When the Northeast Silviculture Institute for Foresters kicked off its tour of two-day workshops in May 2017, it had been nearly 15 years since I had any formal coursework in silviculture.…

Chances are, you’ve already eaten cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) as a tart Thanksgiving condiment whose congealed sauce keeps the shape of its supermarket can. When I was young, I…

A while back I needed to take down a big dead sugar maple. I wanted to figure out the height and how much wood was in it. It was close enough to the road that I ended up getting an arborist to…

Nobody knows who introduced garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) from Europe to North America, but whoever it was must have brought it for its flavor. Anyone who has smelled the crushed plant…

Often, I jest that my husband David and I bought our woodlot as a shared “midlife crisis.” But rather than a passing fancy, stewarding our forestland has truly become an integral…

Geoff Dennis took this photo during a migratory fallout on Monhegan Island. On May 17, 2011, flocks of warblers, flying over the Gulf of Maine on their way to northern forests, were caught in…

With pantlegs stuffed into our boots to ward off ticks, my wife Kathryn and I trudged after Si Balch, our licensed forester, straight into a spruce thicket next to our house. The going was…

Take a volcanic hotspot at a crossroads of ocean currents, isolate it 600 miles from the nearest landmass, and place it under the equatorial sun. Wait a few million years, allowing seeds and…

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…