Last autumn, at our first writers conference, we set up a table featuring 10 different brands of maple syrup from around New England, New York, and Quebec and encouraged people to pick their…

The Blister Rust Battle Resumes, A Cornucopia of Cones, New Fiction by Howard Frank Mosher, Vaccine Ravioli, Ukrainian Forests, Cashing in on Carbon, and much more

This past winter I spent three months exploring East Africa, traveling through ten different countries and covering over 8,077 miles. I was continuously impressed with how much local guides knew about…

Back when I was a boy, despite the fact that my father wasn’t a deer hunter, I’d always know when it was deer season. Even though we lived in a town where the largest industry was…

As an editor I see a lot of first-person writing cross my desk, and the majority of it is the written equivalent of a selfie. The compulsion to report on oneself goes back millions of years, and is…

What does one do with a forest? For the past few centuries, North Americans have typically answered that question in one of three ways. One answer was preservation, to leave the forest alone and enjoy…

Fenceposts have always baffled me. Why would anyone take a perfectly good tree, cut it down, dig a hole to set it in, and then spend the next 20 years watching it decay? In my early days of…

Spotted by Meghan Oliver in Thetford, Vermont. This trail of evidence points to whom?

Spend time in northern Maine, and you’ll likely get an earful of two seemingly incompatible complaints. The first is the scarcity of jobs. The shuttering of the Verso mill in Bucksport last…

Aerial landscape art includes paintings and other visual arts that depict or evoke the appearance of a landscape as it might be viewed by a bird or from an aircraft. This kind of art hardly existed…

Last fall when acorns were falling out of the oak trees by the thousands, a neighbor said we could expect a hard winter. Presumably the deer needed lots of acorns to last them through the winter.…

Imagine you had a power that allowed you to pick up nearby objects without actually touching them. Imagine this power could help you find and choose the best foods while shopping. Imagine you could…

Beavers are well known for damming streams and creating ponds, forging new habitat for a wide range of wildlife. In the absence of streams, however, these ecosystem engineers often dig networks of…

The wood of sugar maple trees is highly valued for its even grain and creamy light color, making it one of the Northeast’s most commercially important hardwood species for use in furniture,…

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The American chestnut may be on the verge of a comeback. More than 125 years after Asian chestnuts arrived in the United States carrying a fungus that caused the near eradication of one of the most…

Wood has been moved by water for hundreds of years. But these days the quest isn’t to move logs downriver to the mill as much as it is to float them to Pakistan, Vietnam, China, or Europe. That…

The distinctively feline tracks through the snow in our woods last winter intrigued me. They would follow the narrow ski trail a ways, then meander into the trees or, sometimes, seem to disappear…

A gallery of berries: These were all found within 10 feet of each other on a ridge sticking out of wetlands in Strafford, Vermont. Top to bottom, what are they?