Hunting is portrayed idyllically by those who love it – you can see it here in this beautiful PR shot from the Fish and Wildlife department. The eager young lad and the sage mentor, likely his…

Spotted on a Christmas tree farm, it’s taller than many of the young trees and still standing straight in late November. What is this plant?

This picture of an amazingly ambitious golden eagle was taken in West Virginia and submitted by Brian Kain to biologist Kevin Oxenrider, who then submitted it to Todd Katzner, who works for the U.S.…

Building a second career to follow a very successful first career is a challenge. When those two careers are as different as, say, being an accountant and operating a lumber company, well,…

A predator’s physical senses determine the manner in which it hunts. Wild canids, for instance, favor their sense of smell – you can see this as they trot along the hedgerows, noses in the…

The mixed hardwood forest on the edge of the town of Dalton in western Massachusetts looks healthy to the untrained eye, but the researchers from the University of Massachusetts who visited the site…

A couple years back, a reader gave me a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, which explores the rich duff of British language related to place and seasonal change. It’s a remarkable book…

Eight years ago, my husband and I planted 128 fruit trees on a hillside, mostly apples, but the back few rows included stone fruits. Our apples began producing with gusto after only a few years. We…

On an early spring evening in March 2017, a large crowd packed a public meeting in Ware, Massachusetts, to discuss a controversial proposal to establish a rattlesnake colony at the nearby Quabbin…

A few years ago, I started an observational experiment in forest succession on a couple of acres where we once pastured sheep and goats. Rocky and wet, without livestock it was hard to keep cleared.…

What happened to these beech trees?

One of our regular magazine contributors sent me this email this week: An awful thing happened this weekend here in Plainfield. I was walking in the fields near my house with my little dog Henry and…

Berries abound in your October photos, which depict a basket full of lowbush or true cranberries, so-called highbush cranberries hanging from a Viburnum, and the lovely but toxic fruit of blue cohosh.…

Mike Bald is a small business owner in east-central Vermont, and his business is the control of nonnative invasive plants. At first glance, his work is simple: he pulls weeds for customers. At a…

November 15, 1976. Late that morning I would shoot my first deer, a buck. But what I remember most about that day is a bird. Burned into my mind is the image of a northern goshawk tail-chasing a…

Late last June, we drove south from Seattle, then north, circumnavigating Puget Sound. Through occasional showers, we caught glimpses of our destination, the jagged Olympics, clothed in forest and…

The common green darner, Anax junius, is one of our largest dragonflies, measuring three inches long with a four-inch wingspread. It is strikingly colored, with a green thorax and a bright blue (male)…

“Your father smelt of elderberries,” taunts the French knight in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. And that was not a compliment. Even Euell Gibbons, the ever-optimistic…

In the summer of 2013, as part of her graduate work at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Jennifer Milikowsky was talking with small-scale landowners in northeastern Connecticut…

A few Thanksgivings ago, my then-ten-year-old daughter and I went for an afternoon stroll.  Unseasonably warm weather made for a longer than planned walk through a power line right-of-way and on…