“Leaves of three, let them be” is the old saying to help keep you from touching poison ivy, but not all plants that have leaves or leaflets arranged in groups of threes have the potential to cause…

Joe Wheelwright, the sculptor, died on September 28. I met Joe while writing this story about him in 2012. When I heard the news of his passing I went back and read it again; looked at the pictures…

On the north end of my home is a nest site favored by eastern phoebes. Every year a pair shows up, sets up house, and raises a family. They arrive early in the spring, and I spend the long days of…

Scenes from the West’s five-year drought are striking – the cracked mud at the bottom of a dry reservoir, forests in flames. Wonder what a drought would look like in Vermont and New…

A bit of fall color on the forest floor. What are we looking at here? (Thanks to Tammis Coffin for the photo.)

I love gnarly trees, and one of the gnarliest I’ve seen is located on the back corner of my central Vermont property. It’s a monstrous maple, sitting on a wide, burly base with knobs here…

We’d torn a burner out of an old hot water heater and suspended it with wire beneath a hastily welded angle iron table; it formed a sort of makeshift stove. Then we set the whole thing outside.…

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten, and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow.” So says the psalmist, a deep fellow, not…

We like to think that everything in nature has its own particular time and place. But nature is fond of throwing us curves. As a naturalist, a common question I’m asked during foliage season is,…

“I’ve got a botanical question for you,” my friend said as he came into my classroom the other day. “Is black nightshade edible?” He’d found some growing near his…

Ben Haubrich sent us these photos of some mossy logs he found beside a pond in southwestern New Hampshire. How long ago were they cut, do you figure?

If you’re into nature and writing, which you probably are if you’re into us, then you probably heard the news a few years back that the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed a bunch of nature…

It was the late afternoon of a long day of hauling timbers, sawing posts, and hammering hand-carved wooden pegs. Excitement ran high among the 10 workshop participants as they carried the first…

In your August photos, a caterpillar transformed, chickadees and chipmunks dined à la main, and hints of autumn yellow appeared along the Maine coast. We’re now on the hunt for September…

The big, meaty green caterpillars that many of us have been fighting to eradicate from our gardens this summer make plenty of people squirm. In part it’s because they are among the largest…

This is an unusual book, deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Gordon Russell chronicles his observations of Great Meadow, a marshland in New Hampshire, from 2000 through 2014. The power of the book…

Clouds of tiny insects, rising and falling hypnotically along lake shores, contribute to the ambiance of warm summer evenings. My recent bike ride was interrupted by a lungful of this ambiance. If you…

Have you ever wondered why patch cuts in the North Woods become carpeted with spruce and fir seedlings within a few years of being cut, while beaver meadows in the same area stay grassy for decades,…

Eric Hanson, a biologist for the Vermont Loon Conservation Project, will give a natural history talk at this year’s Northern Woodlands Conference. The Loon Conservation Project is a joint…

What kind of tree is this, and what happened to the bark?