Knots and Bolts

Nine years ago, I set up my first wildlife camera next to an active beaver pond on a conservation property a mile from my house. On the advice of an ecologist friend, I waited three weeks to…

This March (shortly after this issue of the magazine arrives in mailboxes), the Professional Logging Contractors of Maine (PLC), a trade association, will publish its third study on the…

Burning bush (Euonymus alatus), native to East Asia, first arrived in the eastern United States in the late 1800s. It’s an attractive plant, with corky, winged green stems and opposite…

During my wanders through the woods, I’m always looking for animal tracks and other signs. The bare ground of spring provides a broad canvas for tracks, and good conditions for creating…

Robert Frost, who lived for a time just down the road from where I live now, liked to wander the backroads and wilder places and “botanize.” Although the landscape has changed a…

Celebrated in the fall for their vibrant foliage, red maple trees (Acer rubrum) produce equally vibrant reds and yellows in early spring when they are flowering. Most red maples have dense…

On the Martin Family Tree Farm in Bridgewater, New Hampshire, around the time the hardwoods begin leafing out and the bluebirds return to their nesting boxes, the frog chorus begins. On a…

Sometime between the last half of January and the first part of February, black bears give birth to between one and five (usually two) tiny, blind, almost hairless cubs. Measuring about 9…

In 1974, Cliff Allard opened Allard Lumber Company, a hardwood sawmill, on the site of his family’s former dairy farm in Brattleboro, Vermont. The outfit was a simple, four-man operation…

Tucked into the northeast corner of Connecticut, Steve and Karen Broderick’s 42-acre Town Line Tree Farm straddles the towns of Eastford and Woodstock. The Brodericks purchased this land…

If there’s a bright side to the lengthy darkness of winter, I’d say it’s the much-expanded opportunity for stargazing. Stars and distant planets glitter in the early morning…

Winter in the Northeast is a time of dormancy for most insects, but you may have noticed an increase of tan-colored moths fluttering around your porch light as the days grow shorter. These may…

As deer season begins across the Northeast, regulars stopping by their country store for a cup of coffee, the daily newspaper, and the latest local gossip may also notice wildlife biologists…

For many years, the ancient maples lining the road near my house and in the woods below were festooned with sap buckets in early spring. Now, the buckets have been replaced with plastic…

It’s a warm day at a local climbing crag where I’m teaching middle schoolers nature journaling between ascents. Today’s students are interested in foraging. I pick up a…

Red-bellied woodpeckers have a varied diet consisting of nuts, fruits, frogs, minnows, nestling birds, songbird eggs, invertebrates, sap, and nectar. At this time of year, acorns are a…

When Rich and Ann Chalmers decided to move from California back to Vermont in 1995, they had no intention of managing a large tract of forest – or, really, any idea of what stewarding…

The invitation was irresistible. I was chatting with Dave Small, president of the Athol Bird & Nature Club, who’d just given a winter lecture on moths. The images he’d shared…

Ernie Brooks got his men out and rolling well before dawn at his Mud Lake lumber camp deep in the Adirondacks. A longtime lumberman from Speculator in Hamilton County, Brooks logged near…

In 1984, I bought a two-acre house lot that had been part of a hayfield on a historical farm in Tiverton, Rhode Island. It was located on the narrow coastal plain of Rhode Island’s East…