Have you ever wondered why we start the new year in winter, in the middle of the season of death, instead of in spring, the season of birth? Or instead of in fall, at the peak of harvest/slaughter…

Your February photos revealed the first glimmerings of spring. Sugar makers tapped trees in preparation for the first sap run, and beavers ventured from the ice. Meanwhile, winter timber harvests…

My nine-month-old daughter and I look out our living room window. I point at the marsh below. “See the beaver?” I whisper. Through a tight waterway, a beaver swims. “What sounds do…

I’ve taken to wandering the night lately – one of the pleasures of having a puppy. Willow, my pup, and I walk at all hours, from twilight to midnight and into the shadowy early morning.…

Extreme weather was a big theme in the 2018 news cycle. People died from heat waves in Montreal and Tokyo, of all places. Parts of the Carolinas endured their third “historic” flooding…

Since 2010, Emily Rowe has been part of the Northern Woodlands team, where she now serves as Communications and Circulation Director. She keeps the magazine moving – on the page, online, and in…

This past October, we put together a quiz that tested readers’ knowledge of topics we’d covered over the preceding year in Northern Woodlands magazine, The Outside Story weekly article…

Like most people, I thought I knew where to find fireflies: in back yards and fields on summer nights, flickering on and off like dollhouse-sized lanterns or like Tinkerbell, the tiny fairy that the…

This group of trees grows along the shoreline of a lake in far northern New York. What species are we looking at?

The Spring issue of Northern Woodlands just reached mailboxes this week, hopefully providing a welcome change of scenery from the wintery conditions outside your window. Among the most hopeful signs…

Recently, we discovered this barred owl near the Northern Woodlands office – dead, frozen, and wedged in a tree cavity roughly four feet from the ground. The head was pulled back into its…

Act One opens in a forest on the western slopes of the Taconic Mountains in southwestern Vermont. A man in his forties is walking with his former high-school geology teacher – a man now in his…

Each year that we run the West Branch of the Penobscot into the big lake, I think, this will be the last time. Our canoes packed for the four-day trip, we slide into the river at Old Roll Dam and let…

Upstairs in the Northern Woodlands office hangs a copy of Charles Joseph Minard’s map depicting France’s 1812 invasion of Russia. It’s a remarkable work, both for the story that it…

A couple of months ago I heard Thor Hanson interviewed on the radio and he said – maybe not exactly, but close – that “Keeping honey bees does little or nothing for bee conservation.…

I have an old farm field that seems to want to be a white pine nursery. If I didn’t brushhog it once a year, the trees would take over in no time. As it is, the seedlings are so dense in places…

It used to be that in order to see or photograph wildlife, you’d have to be either incredibly lucky or spend hours crouched behind a blind. But now, thanks to the wide availability of high-tech…

A new tool has been approved in the fight to control invasive pale and black swallowworts, and it’s a good sign for monarch butterflies. The natural enemy of the swallowworts is a Hypena moth…

A few winters back, there was a doe who frequented our compost heap. The garden fence around it proved an inadequate barrier, as she simply hopped over it to nosh on the rotting shards of…

Patricia Liddle took this photo recently in Canaan, New York. Any idea what caused these horizontal deformities in the maple?