For those of you who aren’t following the battle to ban bear baiting in Maine, here’s a quick recap. The Humane Society of the United States and a coalition of smaller local animal rights…

Jan Van Meter recently spotted “two of these white balls with pink nodes” attached to the twigs of a white oak in southern New York.

My greenhouse has had a lot of jobs over the years. Originally, it was intended to grow greens in winter and start seedlings in spring. Later, it served as a barn for sheep and goats. Now, it has…

“We had an old Corley semi-automatic carriage mill in a little 40-by-80-foot building when we started,” said Dave Buxton, who founded New England Forest Products (NEFP) with his wife,…

I’m always entranced watching the hunting behavior of long-legged wading birds like great blue herons and snowy egrets. They stand motionless for long minutes at the edge of a pond or swamp,…

This April, as part of Northern Woodlands’ spring fundraising effort, we published a quiz with nine mystery photos and challenged readers to identify any three of them in a line (à la…

Twenty years ago, I planted 1,600 black walnut seedlings on a site a few miles outside of Barre, in central Vermont. Four years later, I planted another 700. A dairy farm had operated on the site for…

Once, hiking on the west coast, I picked up a big, bright yellow banana slug from the forest floor and brought it to my wife. She remembers that too – vividly. Ok, ok, I know, snails and slugs…

Four thousand years ago, the native people of North America’s eastern woodlands cultivated a protein-rich superfood. Variously called lamb’s-quarters, goosefoot, or pigweed, the plant…

Red and Georgia were sitting on the lip of a Long Trail lean-to together, while the rest of us were massed on a nearby picnic table eating lunch. Red was a 20-something Irish-looking kid with a kind…

It’s metal, it’s rusty, and it’s hollow. This is a section of a longer piece found in the woods in southern Vermont. What is it?

“She’s so cute!” a little girl coos to the snowy white owl. The owl blinks languidly, ignoring her admirer. No doubt she is used to human attention, as she is one of the more popular…

Retracing Reforestation on an Old Carriage Road For years, the sign “Old Carriage Road” marked an overgrown length of abandoned roadbed halfway up the road to the summit of Mount Philo…

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a...? In September of 2012, I spied something fluttering wildly on the lavender phlox in front of my house. At first I thought it was a hummingbird,…

Red petals decorate the forest floor in Windham County, Vermont, on Memorial Day weekend. What are they?

My partner and her son are both tech savvy, and both regard the fact that I’m a Luddite with amusement. They try to help me see the light but it rarely works. I won’t upgrade my 9-year-old…

Around a beaver pond, we sometimes catch a whiff of beaver odor. People have described it to me as smoky, woody, or like tobacco. It may waft over from the lodge, or it might emanate from scent mounds…

Even devoted birdwatchers find it tough to love the brown-headed cowbird. Black body. Fat head. Grating voice. And the female is a homely gray. Not exactly a glamor couple. But appearance is only part…

The theme of this issue is time passing, and I want to open things by telling you about a big story that never happened. In the late eighties, large chunks of forestland – the core of what makes…

A frequently cited study (circa 2002) states that 70 percent of magazines never make it past their first issue, and approximately 50 percent fail in the first year. In other words, new magazines have…