This anthology brings together stories, essays, and poems from 42 remarkably diverse authors, from trout-fishing notables Ernest Schwiebert and Robert Behnke to poets John Hollander and W. B Yeats.…

Perhaps the most striking thing you first notice about the book Wild Neighbors (besides the stunning, full color, close-up portrait of a pileated woodpecker that graces the cover) is its size. The…

We left camp just before daylight. The air was thick with mist as we made our plans to hunt the ridge where Chuck had jumped a nice buck at the end of the day before. Our topo maps showed that the…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust the…

Tree roots are inscrutable. While their importance to the aboveground parts of trees and forests is well appreciated by forest scientists, tree roots have always been notoriously difficult to study,…

We’ve all seen it before: hidden in a thicket is a lone apple tree that hasn’t made more than a bushel of apples in the past 10 years. We know the deer, bears, turkeys, and partridges…

Until a recent study, little was known about the effects of intensive forestry practices on snowshoe hares in northern forests. After studying hare populations following precommercial thinning (PCT),…

The bark of older and larger white pines is crusty and ridged, but before that, in youth and adolescence, a pine’s bark is smooth, interrupted only by whorled branches, and is usually a deep…

During the most recent ice age, the Great Plains were part of a white spruce forest that existed in a broad, transcontinental band south of the tundra, which in turn extended north to the southern…

In the kitchen cabinet trade, hard maple is king these days. Also widely used for flooring and trim, hard maple is highly valued for its durability and light-colored sapwood. As Dave Clements and I…

Feeding deer is something of a time-honored tradition in New Hampshire and Vermont. The hardship of winter moves some well-meaning people to set out food for deer, while more-pragmatic souls believe…

We’ve taken down the window screens and fired up our two woodstoves now that more seasonable weather has settled in. We burn about six cords of wood each winter on our farm, a fact that I have…

In October 2006, Charlie Hammond, a resident of Troy, Vermont, shot what he thought was a coyote in a field. Turns out, the animal weighed 90 pounds, about twice as much as the average Vermont coyote.…

American eels were once an important food source for the Abenaki peoples of New Hampshire and Vermont. When autumn arrived eels were captured in stone weirs as they migrated down river. Traps…

We’ve been transforming a small wilderness behind our house into a rock garden. Clearing away litter revealed a tiny, unusual fungus I’ve wanted to find for years. The Greek word for cup,…

With two daggers extending from each foot, ticks are well armed. And they are endlessly patient. Swaying on a blade of orchard grass, a tick extends its questing legs and waits. Night and day, through…

A friend of mine told me about a hedgerow he liked to visit that was a short distance from his home. It was a spot he checked regularly with his binoculars, searching for the many birds he knew he…

The next time you wander into a patch of stinging nettles, or contract a bad case of poison ivy, try to see things from the plant’s point of view. Our green neighbors get picked, eaten,…

I am sitting in the dark at the mouth of a cave. My knees are drawn up, and my heels are hooked over a slab of a rock to stop me from tumbling forward on the steep slope. If I stretched out my arms,…

For shade, for stature, for sheer physical grace in the tree world, nothing beats an American elm. The first colonists in New England took notice of this native hardwood tree’s qualities and…