This skull was found in southern Vermont in a small patch of woods at the edge of a farm field. What kind of animal is it?

Many print-media outlets publish summer book recommendations, and for good reason. Part of the joy of reading is sharing what you’ve read. There’s also a practical component: since blindly…

To be wet on a hot summer day is a glorious thing. On a steamy weekend, you don’t have to go far to find long lines of cars beside the road and people soaking in the river below. One of the…

To birders and meadow-walkers alike, the bubbling, exuberant song of the bobolink is one of summer’s highlights. Singing as it swoops over grasses, this black bird with a yellow cap, white wing…

Our Executive Director found these in his garden. Is this Animal? Or Botanical?

Riverwalking – the act of hiking up a river or stream in the summertime – holds a special place in the rural ethos. It’s as much a part of summer as 4th of July fireworks, or August…

One mid-summer day while out for a walk, I heard a loud buzz and looked up to marvel at a hummingbird moving methodically along the bark of a basswood tree, lapping up sap that oozed from small holes…

The founders of Northern Woodlands magazine, Stephen Long and Virginia Barlow, were recently honored with the 2011 Vermont’s Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence. Long and Barlow…

At first I thought that the bee was attacking me. As I dashed out of our garage, the bee suddenly appeared and hovered before my face in a seeming challenge. It looked like a bumble bee with a white…

Yes, we know it’s a woman. The plant. What’s the plant she’s holding?

It can be hard to summon the appropriate motivation to cut firewood in early July. In light of this, I keep a newspaper article taped to the refrigerator that highlights the billion-dollar quarterly…

In Teale's 1956 book Autumn Across America he refused to see leaf fall as a sad occasion, but bear in mind that he wrote this book as he was travelling across the country, not standing at his…

In the fall of the year, in almost any rural locale in the northeast, you are likely to hear an apocryphal tale about the unschooled recent arrival from down-country and his tamaracks. The complete…

What do loggers and moneylenders have in common? When is a lumberer a lumberjack? And what the heck is a lumber room? The answers to these questions are intertangled and ancient, and can be found in…

We’ve become accustomed to constant improvements in the high-tech world. Computing power doubles every 18 month, new software upgrades become available by the week, and no sooner have you…

A century ago, northern New England was a mess. Its forests were cut over and burned out, and the remaining stands were a mere remnant of the wooded expanse that once sheltered native peoples and…

Last June, Rose Paul, The Nature Conservancy’s director of science and stewardship in Vermont, grasped a seven-foot-tall American elm sapling at the base of its trunk, slid a three-gallon pot…

Our friend Elinor Osborn took this surreal picture. What is it?

Water power. Our ancestors, those stalwart souls who headed off into the wilderness to build new settlements, depended on it. They dammed streams and rivers to power the mills that were essential to…

Our reaction to the word ‘parasite’ is usually one of disgust. After all, aren’t parasites the creepy, revolting little creatures that burrow into animals’ bodies and spread…