It is a question I face each year as March winds into April: when to take down the bird feeder. Our avian feeding station is basic: a single run-of-the-mill hopper, which I fill with a local mix of…

This Week in the Woods, spring has finally arrived. Volunteers are on standby, monitoring temperatures and nighttime rain forecasts, to predict when spotted salamanders, wood frogs and other early…

Among the very earliest signs of spring are the strange caterwauls of the barred owls that haunt our woods: “Who cooks for you? who cooks for you all?” Their hooted conversations, thrown…

Your February photos included images of winter resident birds and northern visitors, a tree valentine, and quiet scenes illuminated by soft winter light. A number of you shared intriguing patterns. In…

We found these splintery wood chips scattered across the snow beneath a sugar maple in a Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, forest. What happened here?

Steve Denette has rock climbed in Yosemite, sea kayaked along the coast of Maine and canoed the state’s inland lakes and rivers, and completed countless traverses in the White Mountains and…

With spring creeping closer, our year-round avian residents such as cardinals and titmice are already raising their voices. But there’s more than one way to make music, and birds have evolved…

On my commute to the Northern Woodlands offices in Lyme, New Hampshire, I pass a long-established osprey nest, perched atop a very tall electric tower next to Route 302. This location offers the…

Even in early March, you can still sometimes find invertebrates crawling across the surface of deep snow. What is this little creature?

In the midst of the pandemic, Deana Tempest Thomas left her work in healthcare, purchased her childhood home in North Scituate, Rhode Island, and hatched a plan to create a small farm there. In the…

To survive the cold of winter, some animals take advantage of protected habitats, such as wooded areas or under a blanket of insulating snow. Ruffed grouse, for example, fly into piles of loose snow…

Between 60 and 80 percent of plants growing in the Northeast, including many of our food crops, need pollinators to reproduce. While many people associate pollinator habitat with wildflower meadows…

Every year, on the first warm, rainy nights of spring, thousands of spotted salamanders, wood frogs, spring peepers, and other amphibians migrate en masse to their breeding wetlands in a phenomenon…

Cyanotypes are among the oldest photographic printing processes. In 1842, English chemist, astronomer, and experimental photographer Sir John Herschel invented this technique as a way to copy and…

Forestry often involves the blending of technical solutions with ecological knowledge. Such is the case with scarification of the forest floor, which is typically done in conjunction with a timber…

On a mild day the earth drinks its tea and then begins to sing again even the trees pause to notice, the air is a velvet coat that everyone wants to wear the sky becomes a stair down which descend the…

The migration of birds ranks among our planet’s most conspicuous, awe-inspiring natural phenomena. From nearly every corner of the globe, birds as diverse as hummingbirds and herons, geese and…

Every year just after Memorial Day, when the blackflies are at their cruelest, I take a Maine fishing trip with my brother Jake, his twin daughters, my two sons, and one of my daughters. It’s…

During our first autumn in Westford, Vermont, a wave of ladybugs attempted to make our home theirs for the winter. My wife expressed concern that our toddler might eat one. I replied, “Well…

My mother is a master gardener. In the spring, her beds are an explosion of showy blossoms, and in August, her gardens overflow with vegetables. Although we share a lifelong love of plants, our…