In Fairlee, Vermont, there’s a 540-acre stretch of former glacier called Lake Morey. If a loon on that lake pointed his bill northwest, flew straight as the idiomatic crow, and kept flapping for…

The scientific process is a long and complex trail that sometimes leads to dead-ends and conflicting results before clear conclusions can be drawn. Throw in a dose of climate change to muddy the…

Many places have fantastical creatures: the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, Sweden’s skvader (half hare, half wood grouse), and, of course, the Pacific Northwest’s tree octopus. The state…

Fifteen years ago, on its centennial anniversary, The National Audubon Society recognized 100 “Champions of Conservation” in the twentieth century. All are individuals who have worked…

Three tom turkeys vie for the attention of one hen. If puffed out feathers, red wattles, fanned tails and lowered wings don’t win her over, a repertoire of nonvocal “hums” and…

Some of the timberland my family owns abuts state forest. On our side of the property line is a thoroughly ordinary mix of beech, red maple, and white pine. Mixed age, but pretty young; the whole…

As the sunset colors fade from purple to black, the forest is dimly illuminated by a first quarter moon. An eerie sound breaks the calm. It is not the long, low, slow howling of wolves that can be…

Bob Chandler came across this scene on a logging job in Maine.

We hear all the time about how winter’s disappearing in this era of climate change (The New York Times recently ran a piece called “The End of Snow?”), so I can’t help but…

The Maple Industry Reaches Its Boiling Point, Harvard’s Old Growth Laboratory, Wood on the Move, Mystical Creatures, Building a Better Peavey, Waiting for Ice Out, and much more

Black birch tea was one of the first wild foods I ever tried. Some high school friends boiled pots of birch twigs to make what they called “brew” while telling jokes and stories over the…

Log truckers have nothing to haul if loggers aren’t cutting wood, and the rain this past summer kept loggers out of the woods for weeks at a time. Don Moore, Jr., a log truck operator from East…

While winter in New England can be stunningly beautiful, with its magical snowfalls and ethereal silences, I must admit that by mid-February the long absence of so many songbirds has me feeling…

We carefully rolled the big spruce log with our peaveys, and it settled into place with a thunk, fitting almost perfectly over the log beneath it. A little fine tuning with axe and chisel and it…

On October 8, 2013, friends Dan Russell and Charles Baldridge stood on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain and had what they later described as an awe-inspiring experience. For an hour and a half,…

I flew out of Albany, New York, the other day. It was nice and clear and you could look down and see the sprawl – the ordered, grid-like subdivisions from the 1950s immediately around the…

We won’t make you guess how many there are, but we want to know what they are and why they all landed on the ground at the same time in late December? (Penny Harris took this shot in Cambridge,…

It’s late afternoon, and fine snow is sifting down into Joan and Bill Hildreth’s woods in Montgomery, Vermont. Their property lies within a large expanse of forest on the edge of the…

I’m driving to work too fast, late as usual, trying to make up for those last five minutes I spent puttering around my house when I should have gotten out the door. I lean on the accelerator a…

“They had to leave the hollies,” Brian Tefft said, pointing across an opening studded with snow-touched slash to a pair of green-bowered bluebirds. “That was one stipulation.…