I went deer hunting last week with my friend Bill at his camp in the Adirondacks. The trip over entailed a beautiful ride down Route 28, then a misty boat ride across a frosty lake. The camp sits on…

What are we looking at here?

Water gets its poetic due, and with good reason. As composer Paul Winter wrote in Marjorie Ryerson’s book Water Music, water “represents an aspect of wild nature without which we would…

Years ago, I stopped when I saw a turtle attempting to cross a high-traffic road. When I picked it up, I noticed its intricately sculpted shell. The top, or carapace, was covered with layers of bony…

A large V of Canada geese flying noisily over my head – and traveling north, rather than south – got me wondering about the ins and outs of fall migration. Shouldn’t these big birds…

Spotted beside a pond. What’s on this sapling?

Here in Vermont there’s an interesting political race going on for governor, and it relates to our subject matter in that the contest might hinge, in some small but possibly significant way, on…

Technology tracks the toll road salt, phosphorus, and invasive species are taking on Lake George Ancient legends say that when a mermaid dies, her soul rises from the depths to become foam, or…

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As Eve so famously discovered, apples are alluring. These brightly colored orbs tempt us with crisp flesh and juicy sweetness. It’s no wonder that apples have spread throughout the temperate…

Your September photos revealed high-elevation leaf color and the woods in transition. Rattlesnake plantain, an evergreen orchid, gleamed against brown leaves, while an actual snake basked. One…

The Canada geese now honking overhead in V-formation, perhaps more than any other birds, exemplify the fall migration. Except when they’re not really migrating, and except when they’re not…

Almost every time I checked the game camera last summer – whether it was stationed near the compost, pointed into the field, or hidden at the edge of the woods – I found photos of one of…

Dean Bennett begins this memoir by reminding his readers that, in days gone by, the most important enterprise in the small Maine town of Locke’s Mills used to close down on the first day of deer…

A new breed of building appeared on the UMass campus in Amherst this past winter. In a landscape full of concrete, brick, and stone rose a four-story wooden frame, fitted together like a piece of Ikea…

Yellow-fuzz cone slime (Hemitrichia clavata) is a slime mold that is found in clusters on rotting wood. Neither plant nor animal, slime molds are known for the dramatic transformations they go through…

In the southeastern corner of Vermont is a 465-acre forest owned by the town of Vernon. It’s named the J. Maynard Miller Municipal Forest, after the local dairy farmer who convinced his town to…

The grapevine was so important to the ancient Romans that they called it vitis, after the Latin word for life. Today, botanists still give the name Vitis to the genus of grapevines. While the wild…

Have you, too, been annoyed by books that should have been abbreviated and published as pamphlets – how to change a tire, organize your garage, or how to make kimchi? I was ever so slightly on…