For years, birders have had a wide variety of multimedia educational tools to help them learn bird identification and natural history. Beginning with cassette and VHS tapes, to CDs, CD-ROMs,…

In early March, when many cold-weary souls head south for a late winter respite, others spend their days in toasty ice-fishing shacks on still-frozen ponds and on the bays of quiet rivers. They have…

Certification Comes to Family Forests Growing Your Own Mushrooms Springtime in the Turkey Woods Can the American Chestnut Come Back?

I came across a recent story in The Oregonian (“Fall in wood products market redirects environmentalist strategy,” by Michael Milstein, December 20, 2008) talking about the changing…

Cold. The low-angled winter sun burning dully through a nickel-colored sky. Cold. The kind that bores into you, a stinging insect as it breaches the skin, then tingly as it fords your blood, and…

For many in New England, the grey days of March are among the sweetest of the year. March is when sugarmakers hike to their sugar maples, drill tap-holes into trees, hang buckets and await the welcome…

The 2009 season began in earnest last Friday. We had a small run in our southern Vermont sugarbush – enough to make the first syrup of the year. The beginning of the year is always the most…

The tracks in the snow were everywhere, penetrating into the deepest parts of the thicket, where only small animals go. Inching across frozen landscape on snowshoes, and ducking eye-level twigs, we…

At 6:00 in the morning, clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitoes hover outside the bug net on Len Reitsma’s head as he hikes through a wet forest to his field-study site. A dull light glints off the…

Times are tough. There’s absolutely no getting around it. Job losses, foreclosures, an anxious nation that’s holding its breath waiting to see how bad it’s going to get. Facing those…

Like ghosts from the Arctic, snowy owls have descended on New England this winter. They’re showing up in fields, along highways and in some backyards. These migrations from the arctic tundra are…

As far as I can tell, there is no cell phone reception anywhere in the Town of Corinth. Consequently, in the office and at home, we continue to use a land line for nearly everything. My wife and I do…

Whether you know the Adirondacks as home, second home, vacation destination, spot on the map, or not at all, you’ll certainly have a deeper understanding of the place after reading Philip G.…

Recently I was standing on the landing of an active logging job with the landowner, who was my client. On this job, I was selling the logs to a number of buyers based on end product, as opposed to…

Common goldeneyes are on the prowl. In icy waters near you, these ducks are cavorting and splashing in an odd courtship ritual. In the afterglow of Valentine’s Day, they are proof that cold…

In early summer, our main sugarbush is a lush, earthy place. Limestone knolls roll into soggy spring-fed depressions. Two-hundred year old maples loom – their hard, vertical shapes softened…

Tom Whalen, of Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts, and Whitefield, New Hampshire, and his mentor of 25 years, Dale Butterworth of Cumberland, Maine, have parlayed their long-time interest in collecting…

In August, the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) was discovered in Worcester, Massachusetts, by an astute resident. The city quickly mobilized; today, a 62-square-mile quarantine zone stretches around the…

Trees and shrubs can’t pull up roots and traipse around populating the countryside. They spread their seeds with help from wind, water, gravity and animals. Their seeds have parachutes, wings,…

I don’t know anyone who knows the names of 18 kinds of snow, which, as legend has it, any Inuit can easily reel off at an early age. But by last April, everyone I know had at least 18 words to…