A snowshoe hare lives down our tree-shrouded road where the track narrows between dense woods. Also known as the varying hare, the snowshoe hare is cousin to both the smaller southern cottontail…

Wood is a renewable energy resource. It’s local: so local that, for many of us, it’s available just a few steps out the back door. It’s nearly carbon neutral: trees absorb enough…

Winter will officially begin on Saturday, but it is already kicking in around here, making those of us of a certain age reminisce about the snowstorms of yore. I remember winters in Syracuse in the…

In years when winter food is scarce in the boreal forests of Canada, flocks of birds migrate south and irrupt or “burst” into local fields, forests, and feeders. The winter of 2007-2008…

I’m a print guy, but I haven’t always been a print guy. My first involvement with media was nearly 30 years ago, when I learned the nuts and bolts of video production in the late 1970s at…

Of all our native mammals, none seems to elicit more disdain or hostility than the fisher. “Nasty,” “bloodthirsty” and “vicious” are some of the adjectives used to…

Lakes of the Clouds hiking hut sits on the southwestern shoulder of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. At over 5,000 feet elevation, the hut sits about 250 feet above…

Moosehead Lake is one of Maine’s natural treasures. Ever since Plum Creek, the Moosehead area’s largest landowner, unveiled its long-term plan for its holdings around the lake, arguments…

If you’re in a fishing boat on Lake Champlain, the boundary between New York and Vermont can seem quite blurry, so blurry that fishermen from either state can fish anywhere on the lake with only…

“Nature is a magic show of the highest order,” writes Bernd Heinrich in The Snoring Bird, his very seductive personal narrative. “I can hardly think of a greater grandeur and…

This anthology brings together stories, essays, and poems from 42 remarkably diverse authors, from trout-fishing notables Ernest Schwiebert and Robert Behnke to poets John Hollander and W. B Yeats.…

Perhaps the most striking thing you first notice about the book Wild Neighbors (besides the stunning, full color, close-up portrait of a pileated woodpecker that graces the cover) is its size. The…

We left camp just before daylight. The air was thick with mist as we made our plans to hunt the ridge where Chuck had jumped a nice buck at the end of the day before. Our topo maps showed that the…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust the…

Tree roots are inscrutable. While their importance to the aboveground parts of trees and forests is well appreciated by forest scientists, tree roots have always been notoriously difficult to study,…

We’ve all seen it before: hidden in a thicket is a lone apple tree that hasn’t made more than a bushel of apples in the past 10 years. We know the deer, bears, turkeys, and partridges…

Until a recent study, little was known about the effects of intensive forestry practices on snowshoe hares in northern forests. After studying hare populations following precommercial thinning (PCT),…

The bark of older and larger white pines is crusty and ridged, but before that, in youth and adolescence, a pine’s bark is smooth, interrupted only by whorled branches, and is usually a deep…

During the most recent ice age, the Great Plains were part of a white spruce forest that existed in a broad, transcontinental band south of the tundra, which in turn extended north to the southern…

In the kitchen cabinet trade, hard maple is king these days. Also widely used for flooring and trim, hard maple is highly valued for its durability and light-colored sapwood. As Dave Clements and I…