As a young woman and Asian American urbanite, I defy almost every expectation of who an American hunter should be. So I was both captivated and inspired by Brant MacDuff’s nonfiction book The…

In Mason Goes Mushrooming, author Melany Kahn and her young protagonist, Mason, take readers on a series of imaginary foraging adventures, and every walk is a treasure hunt. Each adventure teaches a…

When it comes to winter in the North Country, brown is not beautiful. Climate change has brought sudden and extreme fluctuations in weather along with a dramatic decline in the amount of snowfall that…

This week in the woods, we discovered this pileated woodpecker excavation in a dead tree, with wood chips and dislodged tinder polypore conks scattered around the tree’s base. If you look…

This Week in the Woods, we finally climbed up a steep hillside to collect photos from a game camera near a log, where different species urinate, rub scent glands, and otherwise leave their calling…

Last February, several evening grosbeaks, which we rarely see here, visited our feeder. About the size of robins, the males were yellow with black and white wings, a black tail, and a bright yellow…

January is typically the month when we get the most ice photos from readers. From Carolyn Wheeler’s feathery bubble ice to Susan Lichty’s ice ball stem, there are many odd and beautiful…

Writers in the Woods, a companion series to our Community Voices interviews, focuses on authors and artists whose work relates to the forests of the Northeast. For the first interview in the series,…

A Northern Woodlands staff member found this creature crawling across a sunny patch of Vermont woods in late February, 2021. What is it?

This week in the woods, we took a walk along the Ompompanoosuc River, where this winter’s ongoing temperature swings have created debris fields of ice shards. These start during a thaw as the…

Bright red, soft, and velvety… no, I’m not describing a Valentine’s Day decoration, but a red velvet mite. Built like eight-legged, scarlet Beanie Babies, red velvet mites are hard…

You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me… So wrote Robert Frost in his poem The Star-splitter. The…

This week in the woods, we discovered this barred owl napping below the eaves of a barn. We took these images from approximately 20 yards away, using a zoom lens, to avoid disturbing the owl’s…

The oaks are not doing well at Black Rock Forest. Their growth has slowed as new species of trees have found their way into the woods, and pathogens (such as the fungus that causes oak wilt), insects…

Carbon offset programs often withhold 10 to 20 percent of offsets generated by a project, as a buffer against changes to the forest that might affect carbon storage over a century or more. But this…

Red Rocks Park in South Burlington, Vermont, takes its name from the iron-tinged Monkton Quartzite, formed some 500 million years ago. But above the old red sandstone are bands of younger limestone,…

For such a tiny creature, hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) can cause a remarkable amount of devastation. This non-native, aphidlike insect sucks the nutrients out of hemlock trees, and – because of…

The horned lark (Eremophila alpestris), so named for its tiny feather tufts resembling miniature devil horns, is the only true lark species native to North America. These birds nest on prairies,…

At Hoffman Evergreen Preserve in Stonington, Connecticut, southern trees are growing in forest clearings. Where dense stands of hemlock once shadowed the ground, the terminal buds of loblolly and…

There is nothing that can match the feeling of being on a mountain summit, standing on what seems like the top of the world. Here – with peaks and valleys stretching into forever – is one…