Knots and Bolts

Though few today are familiar with the working toboggan of the North Woods, it was once ubiquitous – the tool of trappers and travelers, a boon to anyone who had to wrest their living…

Eagles obtain food mainly in three ways – by capturing it, by stealing it, or by scavenging it. When securing their own live prey, they hunt from perches or soar over suitable habitat,…

Winter must have been hard for the first human inhabitants of the Northeast as long months passed with few fresh plant foods. Foraging is difficult in the winter, but it is not impossible.…

A new breed of building appeared on the UMass campus in Amherst this past winter. In a landscape full of concrete, brick, and stone rose a four-story wooden frame, fitted together like a piece…

Yellow-fuzz cone slime (Hemitrichia clavata) is a slime mold that is found in clusters on rotting wood. Neither plant nor animal, slime molds are known for the dramatic transformations they go…

In the southeastern corner of Vermont is a 465-acre forest owned by the town of Vernon. It’s named the J. Maynard Miller Municipal Forest, after the local dairy farmer who convinced his…

The grapevine was so important to the ancient Romans that they called it vitis, after the Latin word for life. Today, botanists still give the name Vitis to the genus of grapevines. While the…

In Peru, a botica is a pharmacy – the sterile, white kind, with glass countertops, bright lights, and shelves lined with tidy boxes. But I’ve come all the way to Pucallpa – a…

Editors’ Note: We tend to think of forestland as being either publicly owned or privately owned. But tens of thousands of acres in the Northeast fall into the category of…

Parts of the arid West are so biologically different than the temperate East that they seem like they’re on a different planet. Even places that sound like they should be familiar…

Many people who profess to know nothing about wild plants forget that they enjoyed eating wood sorrel (Oxalis spp.) greens as children. It’s a common childhood experience and I can think…

It was the woods that brought me to Vermont. More precisely, it was the footpath through its woods – the Long Trail. Its moniker “A Footpath in the Wilderness” was part of…

Like many North Country residents, I typically light my woodstove in November, burning 16-inch logs until April. While carting an armload last winter, I noticed tunnels ranging from the size…

The marsh-marigold (Caltha palustris) (also known as cowslip and kingcup) is not a marigold at all; it is a member of the buttercup family (Ranunculaceae) that grows in shaded marshes,…

Dive-bombed by deer flies and jabbed by blackberry thorns, I was in a rush to cut down the beech trees that were blocking the growth of some young white pines, a preferred species for my…

Say you want to know how long a fallen tree takes to completely decompose. You could walk into the woods, cut a tree down, and return to check on it, say, once a month, for 10, 50, maybe even…

As scavengers, vultures rely on leftovers that hunters, both animal and human, leave behind. And when they feed on carcasses or gut-piles of animals that were killed with lead bullets,…

Burdock (Arctium lappa) fits the anti-foraging stereotype: – big, bitter leaves, tough and weedy, with an ugly, gnarled root. “And you want to eat that?” people ask.…

People don’t generally associate Iceland with trees, much less forests. In fact, a casual visitor might dispute the notion that there are any trees or forests to speak of on this rocky…

Don Wharton’s piece on Adirondack mountain men got us wondering about the history of the foothold trap in America. So we looked into things and learned that while the fur trade was a…