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.…

The sign in the window, which read, “Clearance! Hats and Gloves 50% off,” puzzled me. Snowflakes swirled on gusty winds. The bitter cold stung my fingertips—I wondered if I should…

One of the best things about winter is the sunsets. In the summertime, when the air’s soupy and thick, the horizon is often fuzzed out by a skein of haze. The sunsets can be nice, sure, but…

A tree’s growth is based, in part, on competition from its neighbors. Its first priority is to gain access to the sun, and in a forest up is the only way to go. (An open grown tree will grow…

Another strange mark in the snow, which Dicken Crane came across while walking a skid trail.

On our back porch, in a pocket of light from the window, was what looked to be an oversized rat wearing white face powder. As it gobbled down cat food, it flashed a demented crocodile grin. My mother…

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

You could easily breeze past the nondescript Maine Wood Concepts mill in the tiny town of New Vineyard without realizing it’s there. Inside, however, it’s very much alive, with more than…

Fat gets a bad rap in the medical world, for good reason. Excessive body fat is linked to a litany of health risks, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.  Yet in…