Every so often, my friend David texts me a picture of roadkill. A fisher trailing a single strand of blood-red sinew. A wind-roused pile of porcupine quills. A bobcat in graceful, permanent repose.…

A wheelbarrow full of small chunks generated while working up a load of log-length firewood. This byproduct probably wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago. What are they and what changed?

It’s probably safe to assume that most readers of this magazine are well aware that firewood needs to be reasonably dry before it’s burned, and that it’s a pain to move, so…

The fields around our home are something of a bear buffet from mid-summer through fall: wild blueberries in July followed by blackberries, then apples come September, with beechnuts falling from the…

Writers love conflict, and so we often put religion and science in a small pen and make them fight, our readers standing around with fistfuls of dollars cheering one or the other on. There’s a…

Like a lot of hunters, I keep tabs on the deer around our camp with trail cameras that are left up year-round. This particular four-day window presents a couple of nice, teachable moments where it…

What caused this digging in the woods? Hint: The photographer took the picture from a safe distance.

A writer who’d recently had a piece of writing rejected by a magazine once told me that the experience was like walking into an interview and being asked: “I’m thinking of a number…

A Conversation with J.T. Horn of The Trust for Public Land On October 20th, about 140 writers, artists, students, and scientists will gather at the Hulbert Outdoor Center to participate in the fourth…

This time of year, I keep the windows cracked open on even marginally warm nights, savoring the sweet air that sifts through the screens. On that air comes the sound of others relishing the last bit…

For more than a quarter-century, the dawn and the trees have hardly changed at Bear Swamp. Each June for the past 27 years, which is nearly half my life, I’ve bushwhacked the same route into…

One of our big collective cultural fears about nature involves poisonous plants. Our mothers implored us to NEVER put anything from the woods in our mouths, but in reality, you can sample most of…

Except for the Minnesota black bear that chose to spend the winter hibernating 70 feet up in a bald eagle nest, North American black bears don’t hang out in tree nests. Rather, the…

These two Vermont trees are growing just a few feet apart. Can you tell us what species each is?

Harvard Forest released a report last week that’s been grabbing headlines – you can read it here. The big news is that between 1990 and 2010, New England lost 24,000 acres of forest each…

In your September photos, sunlight performs captivating tricks: making rainbows appear in the mist, brightening leaves in the understory, and pulling an afternoon shadow across a well-organized log…

In New England, the edge of autumn feels like no other time of year. The cool nights and warm afternoons call mid-May to mind, but the dawn woods are quiet and splashed with yellow and red. As the…

If you have much to do with firewood, and if you have retained your amateur standing, you will eventually become acquainted with a certain principle – a bitter, rue-laden principle that might be…

On a hike this spring, we walked through a clear-cut area with tall grass and brambles. Afterwards, our pant legs were crawling with black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis), also known as deer ticks,…

Jeannette Segale came across this yellow substance in early August in her back woods in Huntington, Vermont. Do you know what it is?