Adventure begins with Matt’s late-spring visit to “the Pit,” a vacant lot at the edge of his neighborhood. Matt notices something he’s never seen before: water is bubbling up…

With catchy rhymes and colorful artwork, author Miranda Paul skillfully weaves the seasonal play of children with water to introduce the water cycle. Water is Water, an award-winning nonfiction…

You may well remember Annie Proulx’s first book, The Shipping News – a bestseller adapted to film, or her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which became an Oscar-winning movie. In…

I was a bit swamped by new, amazing bird information a couple of years ago when I read Bird Sense, an earlier Tim Birkhead book. This new book, The Most Perfect Thing, is just as good, and it’s…

About 25 years ago, I was thrilled to learn that Russian scientists had introduced radioactive material into a tree and found the same material in nearby trees, proving that trees are connected to one…

New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook Research Forest is a testament to how much can be gained from an enduring commitment to scientific research. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of researchers and…

The North Country lost an iconic writer when Howard Frank Mosher died this past January after a battle with cancer. Mosher wrote 11 novels and dozens of short stories set in Vermont’s Northeast…

Perhaps the phoebe selected her nesting spot during the few days my family was away from home at the end of April. Otherwise, I can’t quite figure her decision to build a nest atop the back…

Chris Wrinn took this photo at Sleeping Giant State Park in Connecticut. She wondered what it was. Do you know?

“Where should I look to find chanterelles?” someone asked the other day. And I said look on rich soil and poor soil, wet sites and dry sites, under hardwoods and under conifers. In other…

Your June photos showed brightly colored pollinators and blossoms. There were also more cryptic woodland wonders, including newborn fawns in hiding, a shy turtle, and a porcupine ascending into the…

Some weighty and persistent questions in the North Woods: Black spruce or red spruce? Green frog or mink frog? Red-eyed vireo or blue-headed vireo? Not that the two vireos look alike. What makes them…

It’s the classic story of unintended consequences. In 1890, Eugene Schieffelin released 60 starlings in New York’s Central Park with the hope of establishing a breeding population. Just in…

I give a lot of tours at my 80-acre homestead, and have found that most visitors are delighted for the opportunity to connect nature with real life. Those of us who spend much time rubbing elbows with…

What’s the white stuff on this tree and on the ground?

There was an interesting profile, written by Ellen Barry, which ran in the New York Times this past spring about a guy named T. N. Pandit, an anthropologist from India who spent the 1960s and 70s…

We have a patch of about 100 pink moccasin lady’s slippers in our woods, and every year, some of the blossoms get munched. We assumed that deer were the culprits. There’s a deer yard up at…

Those of us in black bear country are advised to avoid feeding birds during spring, summer, and early fall – it’s good advice. When I put my feeders back up in late fall, however, I find…

Brambles are hard to mistake thanks to their clustered globes of fruit (what botanists call an “aggregate of drupelets”) and their even more noticeable thorns. At some time, just about…

As daylight drains from the summer sky, a cool breeze rustles through a hay-scented New England meadow. Relaxing in the long grass, even the keenest observer might miss the miniature army that’s…