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 tubing. But…

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 crunchy piece…

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then surely the friend of my enemy is my enemy. This inverted cliche is one way to characterize the tangled relationship between ash trees and the ash-tree…

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 preferred food.…

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 woodlands…

Northern Woodlands Poet-in-Residence, Percy deMutt, recently surveyed our readers for inspiration for a series of short poems. Behold, his fine works: Inspired by: Oliver, age 12 Oliver, age 12…

Tom Ryan has been a forester with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) since 2003. He recently shifted from service forestry – working with private landowners and…

Reader Dan Zucker shared this photo of intricate patterns “in the rust-colored artist’s bracket (fungus) spores on a large fallen birch trunk.” What made these marks?

During a late summer walk, I noticed that the common milkweed in our back field is becoming not-so-common. Once vigorous patches of the milky green plants have dwindled, engulfed in a sea of Canada…

A student plopped a leaf on my desk, pointed to several green lumps on its underside, and asked, “What are those green growths?” It was a stump-the-professor moment, and in this case, I…

We found this exposed sandy area on a hill in central Vermont, where something had scratched up the grasses and disturbed the soil. What happened here?

When Jackie Robidoux retired recently from a career in nursing, she turned her attention from taking care of people to taking care of animals. She’s long enjoyed photographing wildlife and…

Sunlight glinted off the water as we paddled our canoe along a winding channel which led through a marsh of tall grasses and wild rice. Two white, long-legged birds – great egrets –…

The brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) lives out its days in relative seclusion. Like the gray catbird, which has a similar fondness for thickets and shrubby areas, brown thrashers haunt areas of dense…

Author Bernd Heinrich sent us this photo of what he described as “stars in the daytime,” which he spied on August 20th in the noon-time sky. What are they?

Your August photos included a diversity of late summer life, including insects and spiders, juvenile birds, and coral fungi. In Hawley, Massachusetts, Amy Quist did her best to shoo a stubborn snake…

When Elsa Goebel-Bain was 11 years old, her family moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Winthrop, Maine. That move opened a world of outdoor recreation opportunities. Inspired by her family’s…

This spring, we went the no-mow route on about a quarter-acre of our lawn, the last remaining groomed piece we hadn’t turned into vegetable garden or permanent meadow. What a relief! …

This past June, a team from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst completed an outreach publication focused on the experiences and insights of five rural Black landowners who…

Caleb Kenna has been photographing Vermont’s people and landscape for 25 years. In this visual exploration, Kenna spotlights a few of the many waterways that feed into Lake Champlain. These…