Forty years ago, amid the surge of legislation that accompanied the rise of the modern environmental movement, New Hampshire passed its first Endangered Species Conservation Act. The goal was to…

Most nature documentation these days is done electronically through the submission of sightings and photographs. But in earlier times, it frequently meant collecting and cataloging actual specimens.…

If you listen casually to the news about the so-called gig economy these days, this idea of people freelancing instead of working for a big, stable company can seem like a new phenomenon. And yet for…

It was a cold, snowy Sunday morning in the middle of January. I planned to heed the warnings encouraging motorists to stay off the road and turned the radio on to catch the end of an interview with…

Everyone knows dandelions (Taraxacum officinale), and everyone, it seems, has an opinion about them. Loved by children. Reviled by owners of suburban lawns. Dandelions just evoke strong feelings.…

Thanks to Sandy Dannis for sending along this artistic photo. Do you know what it is?

Phenology – the study of when things happen in a particular season – is endlessly interesting, but especially so after a long winter, when we’re starved for change. We know the snow…

Have you ever wondered why we start the new year in winter, in the middle of the season of death, instead of in spring, the season of birth? Or instead of in fall, at the peak of harvest/slaughter…

Your February photos revealed the first glimmerings of spring. Sugar makers tapped trees in preparation for the first sap run, and beavers ventured from the ice. Meanwhile, winter timber harvests…

My nine-month-old daughter and I look out our living room window. I point at the marsh below. “See the beaver?” I whisper. Through a tight waterway, a beaver swims. “What sounds do…

I’ve taken to wandering the night lately – one of the pleasures of having a puppy. Willow, my pup, and I walk at all hours, from twilight to midnight and into the shadowy early morning.…

Extreme weather was a big theme in the 2018 news cycle. People died from heat waves in Montreal and Tokyo, of all places. Parts of the Carolinas endured their third “historic” flooding…

Since 2010, Emily Rowe has been part of the Northern Woodlands team, where she now serves as Communications and Circulation Director. She keeps the magazine moving – on the page, online, and in…

This past October, we put together a quiz that tested readers’ knowledge of topics we’d covered over the preceding year in Northern Woodlands magazine, The Outside Story weekly article…

Like most people, I thought I knew where to find fireflies: in back yards and fields on summer nights, flickering on and off like dollhouse-sized lanterns or like Tinkerbell, the tiny fairy that the…

This group of trees grows along the shoreline of a lake in far northern New York. What species are we looking at?

The Spring issue of Northern Woodlands just reached mailboxes this week, hopefully providing a welcome change of scenery from the wintery conditions outside your window. Among the most hopeful signs…

Recently, we discovered this barred owl near the Northern Woodlands office – dead, frozen, and wedged in a tree cavity roughly four feet from the ground. The head was pulled back into its…

Act One opens in a forest on the western slopes of the Taconic Mountains in southwestern Vermont. A man in his forties is walking with his former high-school geology teacher – a man now in his…

Each year that we run the West Branch of the Penobscot into the big lake, I think, this will be the last time. Our canoes packed for the four-day trip, we slide into the river at Old Roll Dam and let…