The brown thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) lives out its days in relative seclusion. Like the gray catbird, which has a similar fondness for thickets and shrubby areas, brown thrashers haunt areas of dense…

Author Bernd Heinrich sent us this photo of what he described as “stars in the daytime,” which he spied on August 20th in the noon-time sky. What are they?

Your August photos included a diversity of late summer life, including insects and spiders, juvenile birds, and coral fungi. In Hawley, Massachusetts, Amy Quist did her best to shoo a stubborn snake…

When Elsa Goebel-Bain was 11 years old, her family moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Winthrop, Maine. That move opened a world of outdoor recreation opportunities. Inspired by her family’s…

This spring, we went the no-mow route on about a quarter-acre of our lawn, the last remaining groomed piece we hadn’t turned into vegetable garden or permanent meadow. What a relief! …

This past June, a team from Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst completed an outreach publication focused on the experiences and insights of five rural Black landowners who…

Caleb Kenna has been photographing Vermont’s people and landscape for 25 years. In this visual exploration, Kenna spotlights a few of the many waterways that feed into Lake Champlain. These…

Dead wood, also called woody debris, woody material, or even necromass, is a normal and natural part of forests. Dead wood takes a number of forms, from dead-standing trees (snags) to twigs and small…

If you look beneath the damp undersides of cardboard and other packing materials, you’re likely to find tiny creatures that typically hide under fallen leaves and rotting wood, where…

Eight men living with cancer were lined up in the waters of Grand Lake Stream alongside their fishing guides. The swirling, restorative currents of the stream braided together the lives of these men,…

The yellow lampmussel (Lampsilis cariosa) is a freshwater mussel native to medium and large rivers and lakes throughout New England, including the Connecticut River and Housatonic River watersheds.…

Feathers are the single, universal feature that distinguishes birds from all other creatures in the animal kingdom. These wondrous structures, among nature’s strongest and most durable on a…

When I was young, my grandfather’s driveway was overshadowed by a massive butternut tree (Juglans cinerea) that grew in his neighbor’s yard. Grandpa complained loudly about the mess of…

Jeffrey Peacock learned to fish alongside his artist father, James, on the rivers and lakes of Maine, most memorably on the Kennebec in Georgetown. Following his father’s artistic inclinations,…

A few Northern Woodlands readers have confessed privately that what started as the innocent acquisition of an old axe has evolved into a full-blown obsession. Like any obsession, management is…

Driving through a broad valley in western Idaho eight years ago, my daughter turned toward me and said, her voice deepened with emotion, “I love this valley. It’s so beautiful.” We…

After the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 devastated forests throughout the region, fallen logs were salvaged and sometimes stored in ponds and other wetlands, where immersion in water has…

I recently took a drive along Vermont’s Otter Creek in order to see part of the land-scape explored by photographer Caleb Kenna for his feature in this issue. I didn’t have a particular…

The Charlestown Navy Yard has been a fixture of the Boston Harbor shoreline for more than 200 years. Until its closure in 1974, the Navy Yard was a city-within-a-city, with facilities constantly…

Last September, while kayaking up the Connecticut River, I passed a monarch butterfly heading in the opposite direction. I turned my boat and watched it go, a flickering spot of blaze orange, likely…