Odell, a biologist and wetlands specialist, is Wildlife Manager of Region 8 of the New York State Bureau of Wildlife, and we were looking for signs of successful wood duck breeding in a section of…

Jon Raymond had some problems. About 100 of them, each one covered with blue feathers. Those who know him might not have found this surprising. He is on the board of directors of the New York State…

Since the time of the first humans, wood has served as an important fuel source. We relied upon it first for heat, today for electricity, and tomorrow maybe for liquid fuels. Wood used simply as a…

Everybody knows that tree species vary in their ability to tolerate shade. It’s easy to find shady places in the woods where shade-tolerant species such as American beech and eastern hemlock…

The U.S. Forest Service has finalized its latest Forest Plan for the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and Maine, and you can be excused for having missed it. Compared with the public…

The six New England states and New York each have some sort of property tax system in place specifically for owners of forestland. These programs are generally referred to as “current use”…

I’ve always considered myself an early riser, but along the way I’ve learned that early is a relative thing. When turkey season comes along in May, I feel like a slug-a-bed. It’s…

Many people in the Northeast were puzzled last July to find a shiny, sticky goo coating the leaves of all kinds of trees. When the cause was discovered, it just made the situation more baffling. An…

The great secret of education is to combine mental and physical work so that one kind of exercise refreshes the other. – Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) As a self-employed woodworker and…

You’ll find three stories in this issue of Northern Woodlands covering the growing potential for biomass. If these improved prospects for producing more energy and other products from low grade…

It is spring again, and that means that bees are buzzing about. Recently, two studies of bees have attempted to answer two basic questions – how honeybees fly and how bumblebees learn. How…

In our 12 years of publishing, we’ve put together nearly 250 stories; in my admittedly biased opinion, all of those have been read by too few people. Within that lament we recognized an…

Cutting with a dull chain will increase wear on both you and your saw and increase the risk of kickback. How do you know when a chain is dull? A saw with a dull chain doesn’t pull itself into…

Last year, the headlines read, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Found in Arkansas.” Scientists smiled and birders cheered. The largest woodpecker in North America, thought to be extinct for over…

During late summer and early autumn, raccoons in Vermont and New Hampshire witness something of a miracle: food falls from the sky. This is not their traditional fare of plants and invertebrates but…

If you find yourself gazing out the window in winter wishing the hustle and bustle of yardwork could be spread more evenly across the year, don’t despair. There is something you can do right…

After the leaves of sumac have fallen, the large, inverted cones of tiny red fruits that poke up from the tops of their wide crowns give the trees a top-heavy look – a look that is even more…

This has certainly been a normal winter so far here in Vermont and New Hampshire – normal in that there’s no such thing as normal. Temperatures have been above average, and snow depth has…

Birders who have been keeping a tally of their feeder visitors over the past half-century may have noticed an unusual trend: some species that once strictly summered here, including tufted titmice,…

“Ice happens,” says Rod Wentworth, a fisheries scientist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. For the animals that live in our area’s streams, the big question is where…