Four thousand years ago, the native people of North America’s eastern woodlands cultivated a protein-rich superfood. Variously called lamb’s-quarters, goosefoot, or pigweed, the plant…

Red and Georgia were sitting on the lip of a Long Trail lean-to together, while the rest of us were massed on a nearby picnic table eating lunch. Red was a 20-something Irish-looking kid with a kind…

It’s metal, it’s rusty, and it’s hollow. This is a section of a longer piece found in the woods in southern Vermont. What is it?

“She’s so cute!” a little girl coos to the snowy white owl. The owl blinks languidly, ignoring her admirer. No doubt she is used to human attention, as she is one of the more popular…

Retracing Reforestation on an Old Carriage Road For years, the sign “Old Carriage Road” marked an overgrown length of abandoned roadbed halfway up the road to the summit of Mount Philo…

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a...? In September of 2012, I spied something fluttering wildly on the lavender phlox in front of my house. At first I thought it was a hummingbird,…

Red petals decorate the forest floor in Windham County, Vermont, on Memorial Day weekend. What are they?

My partner and her son are both tech savvy, and both regard the fact that I’m a Luddite with amusement. They try to help me see the light but it rarely works. I won’t upgrade my 9-year-old…

Around a beaver pond, we sometimes catch a whiff of beaver odor. People have described it to me as smoky, woody, or like tobacco. It may waft over from the lodge, or it might emanate from scent mounds…

Even devoted birdwatchers find it tough to love the brown-headed cowbird. Black body. Fat head. Grating voice. And the female is a homely gray. Not exactly a glamor couple. But appearance is only part…

The theme of this issue is time passing, and I want to open things by telling you about a big story that never happened. In the late eighties, large chunks of forestland – the core of what makes…

A frequently cited study (circa 2002) states that 70 percent of magazines never make it past their first issue, and approximately 50 percent fail in the first year. In other words, new magazines have…

While the mighty axe rightly receives credit for felling most of the timber of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the peavey that took the work out of moving these logs, on both land and…

By the Numbers: 20 Years of Change When the Trees Took Over The Best of “What in the Woods is That?” Exotic Larch, The Nulhegan We Knew, The Story of Stumpage Prices, Predators with…

Ever since humans invented agriculture and started moving from continent to continent, they have taken plants with them. In most cases imported, non-native plants do not spread much beyond the bounds…

Beech nuts, gravel, emergent vegetation. Where was this strange amalgamation found?

Ask a teacher if touch is important in cognitive development and she’ll tell you yes, absolutely. There’s a whole discipline called kinesthetic learning devoted to teaching in a hands-on…

Days, sometimes weeks, before a luna moth hatches from its cocoon, it starts to move within its winter shell. Quiet bursts of rustling accompany the cocoon’s sporadic movements. Eventually, the…

I don't trust flowers. There are grounds for my suspicion; flowering plants are proven masters of deception. For instance, the sundew uses sparkling droplets of sticky "faux dew" to ensnare and…

Wood knows no boundaries. Not just wood as forest, which straddles arbitrary political boundaries throughout the globe, but wood as logs and lumber. Since humans first learned to turn trees into…