Driving home from work the other day, I saw my first road-killed skunk of the year. And if this year is anything like the last few, it won’t be the last one I see this season. While April…

Man and Nature, published by George Perkins Marsh in 1864, has long been acknowledged as a monument of environmental literature. In 1931 Lewis Mumford memorably called it “the fountainhead of…

Contrary to popular notion, bears are not ravenous upon emerging from their dens in April. Instead, they remain uninterested in food for several days, though perhaps nibbling on the occasional green…

To enter the cave, we donned hard hats and descended a vertical drop with the aid of a rope. We crawled on our knees and bellies through a wet, narrow passageway, emerging into a large underground…

Back to the basics for this one: what in the woods is this?

In winter, camera trapping gets both harder and easier. The challenges include short days that limit the opportunity for color daytime photos, cold temperatures that can tax equipment, and a reduced…

I boiled for 14 hours the other day, and in between draws and fire-loadings read a column by David Brooks in The New York Times about marriage. He said that people tend to view the institution in…

My friend Gordon Russell sent me a letter recently describing a wildlife encounter. He had been following deer tracks along a stone wall when a movement caught his attention. “Almost before its…

Pity the brown creeper. A prisoner of the forest, the creeper seems unable to escape the gravitational pull of the tree trunk on which it creeps, ever upward, gleaning insects, spiders, and their eggs…

It’s still the middle of winter, but the sun is climbing higher each day and I know that it won’t be long until my honey bees are out seeking nectar and pollen. From early-blooming red…

We’re flipping the script a little this time. If you’ve ever spent time in a beaver flowage, you’ve probably seen unexplained (maybe unexplainable) beaver chewing like this. For some reason,…

We boiled our first sap of the year on February 21, and once it started, it ran pretty consistently until last Wednesday. By March 1 we’d made half a crop; we’re now at about 60 percent.…

Your February photos featured carnivore valentines - coyotes, foxes, and bobcats all paired up. Prayer flags glowed on a gray birch, a hermit warbler showed up in Connecticut, and Todd Bauman made a…

Thanksgiving 2015, the first since my husband’s death, we climb the hill to offer him the last cider of the season. Our granddaughter pours the libation around the homemade grave, on creeping…

The bare ground of the trail wound through dead leaves and patchy snow. At a short overhang in the trail, I noticed spiky threads of ice growing up from the soil in crunchy clusters. A careless boot…

Our brains filter and sort what we see to help us understand things. We edit out a plethora of information in order to clarify and organize the world. Carolyn Enz Hack is interested in the layers of…

“We were exploring a remote wetland within the Brushwood Community Forest in West Fairlee, Vermont,” says Susan C. Morse, who captured this shot. “I was bringing up the rear and…

I’m writing this in late January, right about the time that we’re starting the woods work for the coming sugaring season. Ours is a family maple operation that my father and grandfather…

Last March, I kept company with a red-breasted nuthatch who hunted insects on a dying sugar maple outside the Northern Woodlands office. My second floor window provided a close-up view of the trunk,…

In college, I spent a summer building hand-hewn Adirondack lean-tos. The work required both precision and persuasion. We’d chisel perfect saddle notches, which often meant rolling the log in…