Greg Saulnier is paid to be picky. At 44, the Rumney, New Hampshire, native has been looking at logs for 15 years, first as a logger and for the last eight years as a log buyer for Columbia Forest…

In the world of high-end veneer logs, there’s a lot of money to be made – and a lot of things to watch out for. High-end veneer logs are an almost mythological subject. These are the logs…

The young people board the van in the middle of a loud, congested neighborhood. As they ride, they watch the scenery gradually change from factories and apartment buildings to fields and forests. They…

You can invest in them. The simplest investment would be time. There are many young hardwood stands dense with saplings the size of your finger or fist that need nothing more than time to develop…

Vermont and Maine have each gone through a period of great concern over liquidation harvesting. Now it seems to be New Hampshire’s turn. Liquidation harvesting is a term given to the process by…

In July 2003, Maine’s Governor John Baldacci set a very ambitious goal for the owners of Maine’s forestland. By 2007, he wants to see 10 million acres of Maine forestland green-certified,…

Imagine this situation: one fine evening, a local forester knocks on your door and asks if you had been thinking of cutting your woodlot anytime soon. As this very possibility has been on your mind,…

Because of the way our nation was born and grew, we tend to think of land as an infinite resource. Most of us have ancestors who left an Old World where only the wealthy owned land. When they arrived…

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…

At a recent foresters’ conference, I was discussing with a friend a report we’d heard on the future of Maine’s forest products industry. He noted that, while the volume of wood…

The woods road’s worst enemy is water. It makes travel difficult, and if it’s not diverted, rainwater can wash away a road surface in a single summer storm. You can avoid problems like…

Victoria Weber of Bethel, Vermont, would like to add a season to our calendar. It would start after mud season and end before summer; in other words, from April to mid-June. She calls it…

Even if we shun the leggy creatures that make them, we marvel at the geometric precision and dew-frosted beauty of spider webs. There is nothing so elegant, so versatile, and so perfectly suited to…

As a kid, I loved riding my bike endlessly around our Connecticut driveway, looping under an almost mythically giant maple. But one spring, my joyrides were tainted by hundreds of caterpillars hanging…

Since the 1960s, the overall number of birds in at least one of our local forests has been declining. Not the number of species, but the total number of birds. This observation comes from long-term…

The turtle was lying on the white line marking the road edge as I pulled my car over to move it. It was a small painted turtle, and its shell had a deep crack across it. She was taking her last…

I was transported back to 1977 the other day, when I flipped to the peregrine falcon page in an old field guide. I saw that the bird’s range at that time was funneled down from widespread in…

By early June, when the growing season seems to be just getting up to speed, some of our most beautiful woodland wildflowers will have already come and gone. To find any sign of trout lily, spring…

Sea lamprey have been called the least-understood fish of the Connecticut River. Their very appearance can be startling: long, skinny, and eel-like, with a round mouth and no obvious gills. Their…

Soon after moving to Vermont 25 years ago, I began to hear a common lament, delivered with a slow shake of the head and a sigh of Yankee resignation. “There’s no springtime here. We go…