If you find the sight of blissful ignorance in the face of near-death entertaining – and I think in this case most of you will – check out this video of a hapless (though kind of loveable)…

The fluttering flash of black and iridescent green was startling, and it took me a moment to figure out what I was seeing. In the blink of an eye, the movement stopped and the insect seemed to…

One of our favorite recent pieces was Tony Donovan’s photo essay on Amos Congdon, which ran in the Spring 2013 issue. Amos was a woodsman from Lyme, Connecticut, who ran a sawmill in the 1970s.…

If you have a wood pile, you may have come across a shed snake skin ― a translucent, onion skin-like wrapper imprinted with the snake’s scale pattern. Or perhaps you’ve seen one…

Here’s a tip: Found earlier this summer in Vermont.

One of the hazards of working at Northern Woodlands is that people are constantly asking you tricky nature questions. There I’ll be, happily moseying along a trail and someone will spring a rare…

A living jewel hangs suspended beneath the microscope. An emerald sheen shifts with its every pulsing breath over iridescent silver, gold, and bronze swirls. Aquamarine legs hang poised, deftly…

No one could fault you for running away, screaming in terror, if you saw a large, flying, cigar-shaped insect armed with a “stinger” bigger than a sewing needle. Thankfully, the female…

When the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, no one is fooled in the North Country. Those first, yellowish daffodil leaves at the edge of a melting snow bank? Best to ignore them. The…

In assaying wooded land, foresters observe, measure, describe, and map the forest, delineating it into smaller areas – or management units – known as stands. In this way, a forest is seen…

The silhouette of a moose is noticeably different from that of its deer cousins. Its bulky, hunched body sits on tall, improbably proportioned legs. And then there’s that nose. It’s long…

In the 1980s, in the midst of the last spruce budworm outbreak, the pulp and paper industry in Maine and eastern Canada faced an unprecedented softwood shortfall. The insect was killing millions of…

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…