Upstairs in the Northern Woodlands office hangs a copy of Charles Joseph Minard’s map depicting France’s 1812 invasion of Russia. It’s a remarkable work, both for the story that it…

A couple of months ago I heard Thor Hanson interviewed on the radio and he said – maybe not exactly, but close – that “Keeping honey bees does little or nothing for bee conservation.…

I have an old farm field that seems to want to be a white pine nursery. If I didn’t brushhog it once a year, the trees would take over in no time. As it is, the seedlings are so dense in places…

It used to be that in order to see or photograph wildlife, you’d have to be either incredibly lucky or spend hours crouched behind a blind. But now, thanks to the wide availability of high-tech…

A new tool has been approved in the fight to control invasive pale and black swallowworts, and it’s a good sign for monarch butterflies. The natural enemy of the swallowworts is a Hypena moth…

A few winters back, there was a doe who frequented our compost heap. The garden fence around it proved an inadequate barrier, as she simply hopped over it to nosh on the rotting shards of…

Patricia Liddle took this photo recently in Canaan, New York. Any idea what caused these horizontal deformities in the maple?

Beaver dams, ice formations, and winter wildlife were common themes for January. A sun dog glowed in the Pennsylvania sky, and a mostly-white squirrel haunted a Vermont feeder. In Maine, coyotes…

Earlier this winter, Paul Smith College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) published a report on water quality for 21 lakes in Hamilton County. The county occupies the lower, central portion…

En plein air is the French term for painting outdoors; it translates as “in the open air.” This method of painting became popular in the late nineteenth century with the Dutch painter…

Maintaining a sharp chainsaw chain not only makes for faster cutting, it also reduces wear and tear on the saw and the sawyer. Given those obvious benefits, it still surprises me to see people…

THE LOSS OF ASH IS FELT BEYOND THE FOREST With snow on the ground in mid-March, trees in Connecticut’s Naugatuck State Forest presented a dense network of bare branches against a sky the color…

On winter mornings when I look out my window, I often see a gray squirrel clinging upside down to the post supporting my bird feeder, with his front paws in the tray, munching sunflower seeds.…

Had a unicorn pranced across the trail in front of me, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was one of those sparkly winter days, when snow drapes fir trees and glints across the landscape. I was…

What are these football-shaped objects, about .75 inch to 1 inch long, scattered on the snow of a dry site in the Taconic Mountains of Vermont?

This letter came in to us the other day. To the Editors: By this time, you and many of your Vermont readers have most likely heard the podcast on VPR on wood heat. It was a good and thorough treatment…

When I’m skiing or skating across a pond, I observe the shoreline, surrounding hills, islands, maybe a woodpecker or blue jay winging its way to the opposite shore. I look up at the sky, the…

Once upon a time, skiers had to hike uphill for the exhilarating reward of gliding down through the trees. The earliest ski trails in New England were cut through forests in the 1930s – well…

My New Year’s resolution is to not allow political despair to affect the allure of the moon. Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, just before dark here in late December Vermont, the moon…

Come mid-January, when I’m acclimatized to Vermont’s winter, I enjoy an occasional stroll on the icy surface of Lake Champlain. I favor bays sheltered from the brunt of winter winds where…