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There’s a barn by a river, and tree swallows in the sky. They could be a flock en route from Quebec, or maybe just tardy locals, fattening up on insects that were displaced by the farmer’s…

Green Chunks, Long Thoughts, Voles and Moose, Fungi and Spruce, Wild Water, Lake Laboratory, Trade-offs: Exotic Invaders Are a Threat to Our Forests, Building a Timber Frame, Building Community, and…

You can pretty much count on a tree to stay in one place, at least in the real world. Not so in fiction. Remember the walking, talking Ents in the Lord of the Rings movies? Or Groot, the tree-like…

Birdsong has always fascinated humans. Besides waking some of us up a wee bit too early in the morning, it has inspired musical compositions and immortal poetry. It has produced lush descriptions,…

Ear’s this week’s question: What’s lurking just below the view of this game camera?

I was editing a piece the other day on mourning warbler songs, and learned that males who live in different parts of the country sing differently. The variations might sound subtle to you and me, but…

In a world where the natural environment is usually categorized as land or water, a swamp manages to be both. Deer and ducks, mink and mollusks, dogwoods and cattails all coexist in a rich tapestry of…

The first red squirrel appeared at about 50 mph. It climbed up over my headrest and landed in my lap. I don’t recall the next few seconds very clearly, but according to my 5-year-old daughter…

A team of researchers has been studying the effects of adding extra leaf litter and other organic matter to the soil in Harvard Forest for more than 25 years. The original purpose was to test the…

Coyotes have become ubiquitous in the Northeast since they began colonizing the region in the 1920s. The conventional wisdom has been that coyotes are specialists in preying on deer, thus filling a…

Trapping carbon dioxide before it exits power plants, vehicle exhaust pipes, and industrial smokestacks is believed by many experts to be a key step in fighting climate change. The most effective…

The honey bee is an introduced species in North America. It’s only been here about 400 years, brought by English colonists who found none after stumbling ashore and then promptly put in an order…

What happened to this maple tree?

I’ve been trying to explain capitalism and free market economics to a teenager over the past few years, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, and Bernie Sanders, and the teenager having to get a…

In your July photos, a blue heron took to the air, while a snake settled down for a supersized meal. Independence Day fireworks sparkled above the dark tops of trees, and a loon family went for a…

I always do a second take when I see a killdeer skittering across a northern New Hampshire lawn, more than 100 miles from any ocean. These lanky birds look and move like they belong at the shore,…

In 2013, The New York Times ran a story exposing a Scandinavian controversy that has divided Norwegians (and New Englanders) for eons. The question centered around the proper way to stack firewood.…

To be good at catching fish these days you have to be good at letting fish go. Releasing fish unharmed turns out to be a good way to share a limited resource, and depending on what you hook, it also…

The first red squirrel appeared at about 50 mph. It climbed up over my headrest and landed in my lap. I don’t recall the next few seconds very clearly, but according to my 5-year-old daughter…