When I’m hiking, I like to watch for rock basins, sometimes as small as cupped hands, that appear along summits and ridgelines. These are “thin places.” When filled with water, these…

A revisionist theory about the fox has been circulating for a while that challenges the animal’s legendary cunning, suggesting instead that the Reynard of fable doesn’t actually rely on…

This moss-covered mound, around 100 feet long and 4 feet wide, was spotted high on a mountain in a stand of red spruce and balsam fir. What do you think it might be?

The world can often seem too complicated for its own good. It’s a big reason why people like you and I live in a rural place, where things are simpler to some degree. Through this lens, I sort…

Your November photos featured fog, hawks, and the month’s super moon. Bucks knocked antlers, a Virginia opossum scavenged for food scraps, and a flock of snow geese surprised a photographer as…

House sparrows – those little brown and gray birds that flash mob the bird feeder – are common and easy to see. They’re quarrelsome, noisy, and when they’re on the ground, they…

Twenty years ago, scientists experimented with adding calcium to forest soils and found that it boosted tree growth. Today, they’re seeing an unexpected spike in nitrogen loss in these same…

As a kid fidgeting at my grandmother’s Thanksgiving table, I often wondered, what’s the point of cranberries? She had a live-in Irish cook who insisted on serving whole cranberries…

Dana Hillesland sent us these photos she took in northwestern New Hampshire in October. We want to know: What in the Water is That?

Josh Simpson creates planets that are midway between the micro and the macro. They have some of the mystery of the atomic level and much of the complexity of the cosmic. - Neil Armststrong, Commander,…

Owl snow angels can appear at the end of a line of paw prints. But more often I see them without context, on an otherwise unblemished blanket of white. The narrative is implied: one day, a small…

A deer hunter pushes open the door and enters a warm, slow camp. The woodstove pings pleasantly as it accommodates a fresh charge of wood. Wet clothes hung above it shutter slightly in the…

Recently, my daughter participated in Odyssey of the Mind, a creative problem solving competition devoted to ingenuity and team work. As an entomologist, I was thrilled to learn that the program calls…

The Legacy of Henry Laramie, Carving Out a Career, What Does the Fox See?, An Ice Storm Comes to Hubbard Brook, A Seed’s Promise, and much more

The ability to detect the passage of the most elusive wild animals without relying on fresh tracks is a skill that amazes novices. They sometimes assume that such a tracker, like a legendary Native…

The spectacular American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore is the official national art and education center for intuitive, self-taught art. It opened in 1995 with a mission to highlight American…

Tamarack is a tree with a number of aliases – hackmatack, eastern larch, or if you’re from northern Maine and feeling contrary, juniper. Whatever you call it, this scraggly tree, easy to…

“I was following a porcupine one fall day as it ambled up a slight wooded incline,” said naturalist, writer, and photographer Mary Holland. “At one point it took a misstep and came…

Foliage and water were common October photo subjects. A bobcat passed by a game camera, milkweed seeds prepared to take to the air, and a rocking chair beckoned from the Society for the Protection of…

The most prominent event in the November woods is the whitetail rut, and in the spirit of the season, we’re thrilled to be able to share this fabulous video of a buck making a scrape. The…