In your August photos, a caterpillar transformed, chickadees and chipmunks dined à la main, and hints of autumn yellow appeared along the Maine coast. We’re now on the hunt for September…

The big, meaty green caterpillars that many of us have been fighting to eradicate from our gardens this summer make plenty of people squirm. In part it’s because they are among the largest…

This is an unusual book, deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Gordon Russell chronicles his observations of Great Meadow, a marshland in New Hampshire, from 2000 through 2014. The power of the book…

Clouds of tiny insects, rising and falling hypnotically along lake shores, contribute to the ambiance of warm summer evenings. My recent bike ride was interrupted by a lungful of this ambiance. If you…

Have you ever wondered why patch cuts in the North Woods become carpeted with spruce and fir seedlings within a few years of being cut, while beaver meadows in the same area stay grassy for decades,…

Eric Hanson, a biologist for the Vermont Loon Conservation Project, will give a natural history talk at this year’s Northern Woodlands Conference. The Loon Conservation Project is a joint…

What kind of tree is this, and what happened to the bark?

A Special Offer for Educators and Students: Free Digital Subscriptions to Northern Woodlands Are you looking for quality place-based education materials? Northern Woodlands magazine is available FREE…

There’s a barn by a river, and tree swallows in the sky. They could be a flock en route from Quebec, or maybe just tardy locals, fattening up on insects that were displaced by the farmer’s…

Green Chunks, Long Thoughts, Voles and Moose, Fungi and Spruce, Wild Water, Lake Laboratory, Trade-offs: Exotic Invaders Are a Threat to Our Forests, Building a Timber Frame, Building Community, and…

You can pretty much count on a tree to stay in one place, at least in the real world. Not so in fiction. Remember the walking, talking Ents in the Lord of the Rings movies? Or Groot, the tree-like…

Birdsong has always fascinated humans. Besides waking some of us up a wee bit too early in the morning, it has inspired musical compositions and immortal poetry. It has produced lush descriptions,…

Ear’s this week’s question: What’s lurking just below the view of this game camera?

I was editing a piece the other day on mourning warbler songs, and learned that males who live in different parts of the country sing differently. The variations might sound subtle to you and me, but…

In a world where the natural environment is usually categorized as land or water, a swamp manages to be both. Deer and ducks, mink and mollusks, dogwoods and cattails all coexist in a rich tapestry of…

The first red squirrel appeared at about 50 mph. It climbed up over my headrest and landed in my lap. I don’t recall the next few seconds very clearly, but according to my 5-year-old daughter…

A team of researchers has been studying the effects of adding extra leaf litter and other organic matter to the soil in Harvard Forest for more than 25 years. The original purpose was to test the…

Coyotes have become ubiquitous in the Northeast since they began colonizing the region in the 1920s. The conventional wisdom has been that coyotes are specialists in preying on deer, thus filling a…

Trapping carbon dioxide before it exits power plants, vehicle exhaust pipes, and industrial smokestacks is believed by many experts to be a key step in fighting climate change. The most effective…

The honey bee is an introduced species in North America. It’s only been here about 400 years, brought by English colonists who found none after stumbling ashore and then promptly put in an order…