Who hasn’t marveled at a lacy snowflake coming to rest on a jacket sleeve? Do you wonder how it could survive the fall to earth in one piece, or if it’s really true that no two snowflakes…

There’s foreign matter on this tree trunk. What is it?

Detecting small mammal prey beneath a thick covering of snow is among the more challenging skills that some predators must develop to survive New England winters. Most use exceptional hearing and an…

The Clean Air Act, passed more than 40 years ago, continues to provide positive outcomes. The latest good news comes from a University of New Hampshire environmental scientist who reports that lakes…

This winter, a barred owl has been loitering around my house. My husband arbitrarily declared it a male (there’s no easy way to sex an owl) and we dubbed him Squinty McBold. “Bold”…

Trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere and play a key role in mitigating the effects of climate change. But a study by researchers at Dartmouth College found that from a climate perspective,…

The measure of a successful hunt depends on whom you ask; hunters are often biased by individual success or failure, whereas biologists take a detached, big-picture view. But this much is true: one of…

Looking closely at plants, we can learn a lot – about local habitat, climate, hydrology, wildlife, and soils. For example, succulent leaves indicate that a plant may thrive in sandy soil or…

For the past 14 years, my Winter Ecology students and I have spent a lot of time outdoors, studying the preferred habitat features and winter foods of snowshoe hares. We’re likely to find hare…

Richard Carbonetti sent us a series of these photos from the Northeast Kingdom. It isn’t a hiking trail; what is it?

If you were to describe deep, January cold to someone who’d never experienced it before, you might point out that you can hear it. Get below zero and the snow starts to squeak under foot. Your…

Tom Shafer’s business is mining trees. It’s not really harvesting; maybe re-harvesting. “Recovering a forgotten forest” is his company motto. He likes to think of it as mining.…

They look like blobs of shiny tar, a melted lollipop, or a crayon left in the sun too long. They come in vivid colors from orange to yellow to white to black to pinkish. They have a disconcerting…

On a crisp, sunny day in September, at the end of what was probably a typical summer for a dragonfly (lots of flying around, killing things, and mating beside a pond), a common green darner took off…

The Center for Northern Woodlands Education (Northern Woodlands) intends to archive reader photos on its website, and may use these images for other purposes in the future. To that end, we want to be…

In the woods behind our house, there’s a pile of cones and gnawed apart bracts – easily two feet deep and twice as wide – built against the trunk of a tall hemlock. We’ve…

Browse a selection of woodlands-related items in our online shop. You can order online, mail in your order with your payment to: Northern Woodlands, PO Box 270, Lyme, New Hampshire 03768, or call…

This item was seen on the snow at the edge of an old field. What is it?

Editors Dave Mance and Patrick White are holed up in their offices this week, working away on final drafts for the Northern Woodlands spring issue. So now seemed a good time to stage a blog coup, and…

According to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University, last winter was among the top five coldest on record in Ithaca, New York, when you consider the number of days the temperature…