The Outside Story

It’s May and my first year in Vermont. I look out my office window to see a flock of robins land in the staghorn sumac trees that line the backyard. Before I can think, “Spring is…

A logging truck rolling through town on a winter’s day is still a common sight in Vermont and New Hampshire. Though winter has historically been the prime season for logging hereabouts,…

Colder soils in a warmer world? It doesn’t sound intuitive, but it is a possible consequence of global climate change here in the Northeast, and one that might have interesting effects on…

As I walked through a local tree farm recently, I noticed signs pointing out the timber, wildlife, and recreation values of the forest. In the Northeast, we are accustomed to thinking of the…

First, imagine a bat. It’s small. It’s brown or black (or maybe gray, silvery, or reddish, but probably brown or black). Its wings are large and leathery. Its body is tiny and covered with…

It’s an odorless, colorless gas; you can’t see it, smell it, or taste it. As one wag once put it, it’s just the thing to require a bunch of government regulation. But it’s also the…

Most people tend to call any crack in a tree trunk a “frost crack.” But then, most people don’t tend to slice open those trees to see inside. Walter Shortle does. As a…

Peter Mollica loves Fraser firs. I mean really loves them. This is a good thing, since he sells about 10,000 of them every year. His Christmas tree farm sits right on the banks of the…

I want to know the secrets of the sugar maples in our woods. I want to know how they survive the winter, naked except for their thin robes of grooved bark. I want to know how they survive the…

The forest has stopped growing. At least that’s the conclusion reached by scientists at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF) in Woodstock, New Hampshire, after studying the growth of…

The autumn wind and rain have stripped the hardwoods of their leaves, exposing the messy innards of our forests. From the roadside, travelers can glimpse a rotten stump poking up through the…

Wild turkey was a favorite entrée on New England tables two centuries ago. Turkeys were locally abundant as late as the 1830s, when a typical market price for a 15-pound bird was 25…

It would make a great scene in a nature movie. As the cameras roll, the stealthy predator lurks unseen behind some dead vegetation. A grazer ambles by, munching away, clueless to the nearby…

By ordinary human standards, porcupines have many bad habits. Besides extricating their quills from the noses of pet dogs and livestock, humans must throw out axe handles and leather harnesses…

Under the hemlocks, our brook takes on a wildness, tumbling down terraced ledges, rushing around boulders, fretting over rocks. In the tree-cooled waters, I see brook trout fingerlings, no…

“Once upon a time there was a pumpkin.” If you wanted to tell the story of human civilization in this hemisphere, you could begin the tale that way. In between human beings…

The other day I was loading the last of the firewood into the woodshed when a friend stopped by. “Looks like fun,” he said. I happened to know that he himself was not a wood…

Leslie Bowen and her husband, Myron, keep track of 350 cattle, 28 horses, 30 pigs, and 120 chickens on their farm North Hollow Farm in Rochester, Vermont. For almost a year, Bowen has also…

Fifty years ago, the Connecticut River was called the best-landscaped sewer in New England. The river could not support aquatic life, and people could not use it to boat, swim, or fish. But…

I am hanging from the top of a 25-foot balsam fir tree, 3,500 feet up a mountain on a breezy day, counting cones. For more than a decade, I have been studying the fir forests high in the…