The article on growing mushrooms on hardwood logs in the Spring 2009 edition of Northern Woodlands intrigued me. My 16-acre woodlot in North Wolcott, Vermont, had been cut-over hard in the early…

University of New Hampshire (UNH) professor Barry Rock has a piece of advice for anyone studying the forest: enlist a middle-schooler. Rock directs Forest Watch, a program housed at UNH’s…

Reader Ellen Snyder took this picture last weekend at College Woods in Durham, New Hampshire. What is this dark splotch?

Editor’s Note: This week’s blog features the musings of our Executive Director, Walter Medwid. The package of chestnut lumber arrived. Maybe a dozen pieces of various lengths, all in…

There is nothing like the fresh smell of a spring morning, unless, during the night, a skunk skulked about your neighborhood. The striped skunk is armed with just a teaspoon of odoriferous oil in its…

The New York edition of The Place You Call Home is available throughout the state at dozens of locations.

We don’t want to shock the tourists, but the spring woods do bring some color beyond green. While spring displays of herbaceous plants flowering on the forest floor are a treat, there is much…

Reader Garry Plunkett took this photo on his small suburban woodlot in Tiverton, Rhode Island. What is it?

One of Vermont and New Hampshire’s least-known birds is the spruce grouse. This is partly because the birds live exclusively in the boreal forests of northeast Vermont and northern New Hampshire…

Many residents of Vermont and New Hampshire are familiar with salamanders such as the eastern newt (and its terrestrial form, the red eft, which can often be found along hiking trails and logging…

Found this hanging from the rafters of an old barn. What is it and what was it used for?

Elisabeth Tova Bailey was a vigorous, outdoorsy woman living in Maine when she contracted an enigmatic virus or bacterial infection, possibly while vacationing in a Swiss village or on the airplane…

I’ve long been an admirer of Cathie Pelletier’s Mattagash novels. In The Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks, and The Weight of Winter, she creates a fictional territory as rich…

I first read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac in 1971; every year since, I’ve scanned it, quoted from it, lost it, bought it again, moved it, traveled with it, given it as presents, worn…

Unlike the Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, real trees can’t walk away from danger or fight their own battles. When climate becomes inhospitable, forests can only shift ranges over…

The steady “drip, drip” of sap into buckets and the whirring of vacuum pumps pulling sap out of tubing mean that maple sugar season is underway once again across Vermont and New Hampshire.…

This long rusty mark was found on a black cherry near our office in Corinth, Vermont. What caused it?

We’ve all seen them, picking their way thoughtfully across a cornfield or lurking quietly in an abandoned pasture. Wild turkeys seem to be everywhere now. In one field near my home in central…

Five years ago, my wife, Sue, and I swallowed hard, signed a contract on the advice of our forester, and invited loggers onto our land. We’d never had logging done before, so we were nervous.…

Chances are you remember where you were when you saw your first bobcat. Maybe the moment seemed haunted, the cat little more than a ghostly flash of cinnamon and yellow in a spruce thicket, there then…