A landowner set up her game camera along a stream, and made the tactical error of telling her kids where it was located. Several hours after the first image was taken, a mother bear and two cubs…

“I found this huge thingy in the remains of an old maple stump in my yard,” explains Pamela Wells. The accompanying photo shows a cross-section; what is it?

Growing up in a rural town, I was exposed to a lot of the wonders in nature through hunting. Specifically squirrel hunting, which is how many kids get their start. I don’t do much anymore, but I…

As a kid, I was fascinated and terrified by the idea of carnivorous plants. Growing up in suburban New Jersey, my only exposure to this particular subset of the plant kingdom was the ravenous,…

No, this balsam fir is not changing colors as part of fall foliage. What does explain its yellow needles, the undersides of which hold the answer?

This is a grainy photo of an exceptional subject: a common nighthawk twisting in mid-air to capture an insect. The light conditions were poor; photographer Tig Tillinghast was only able to get the…

Driving around in September, you see walls of firewood wedged between yard trees, covered with scrap metal and ready for battle. Porch racks are piled high, and in many rural towns, people are coming…

While performing field necropsies on moose, Maine biologist Lee Kantar has observed as many as 90,000 winter ticks on a single victim. Such moose are anemic and malnourished. With vital fat reserves…

We’ve been blessed to work with hundreds of talented writers over the last 25 years, and we’d like to more formally introduce you to a few of them. The organizing principal behind this…

“Squish, squash.” I was walking gingerly on a soft, spongy carpet of sphagnum moss in a northern Vermont bog. Magenta blossoms decorated the sheep laurel shrubs that lined the edge of the…

Those of us who have lived in the Northeast long enough remember a time when ticks rarely crossed our paths – or our minds. Especially in the northern parts of New England and New York, tick…

Imagine for a moment that you travel on all fours like other self-respecting quadrupeds. Extend your imagination yet a little more, and with it your body, so that a large dome-shaped shell-like…

Last week, a game camera in Strafford, Vermont, captured this wildlife selfie. What are we looking at? Or, rather, what is looking at us?

We recently received this photo for the August readers’ photo gallery, along with this explanation from Bonnie Honaberger: “I found this chrysalis on the ground, thus the straight…

Wait…where did summer go? Your August photos showed the transition from new life to maturity and even the first faint hints of autumn. An adult cicada emerged from its nymphal shell, an…

Last February you might have seen news stories about an impending insect apocalypse. “Huge global extinction risk.” “Plummeting insect numbers threaten collapse of nature.”…

The centerpiece of this issue is a mishmash story on deer and deer hunting – the hunting bit as important a cultural touchstone as we have in the rural Northeast, a culture that’s…

So there we were, my friend “Jane” and I, standing in a field of blazing staghorn sumac. The tree next to us was heavily infested with galls, and to Jane’s dismay, I launched into a…

The Pearl Fishers of the Winooski River by Paul Heller; Burlwood by Nick Rosato; Tick-borne Diseases on the Rise in the Northeast by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul; We Can’t Afford to Buy New by George…

A few times a year, I bring groups of people into the woods to search for red-backed salamanders in the damp netherworld that is the forest floor. Last spring, it was 8th graders. They did their best…