This Week in the Woods we discovered blue flag irises blooming by a forested pond, attended by a number of small butterflies. As Laurie Morrisey notes in this recent Outside Story essay, blue flag is…

In May, you often turned your lenses on owls. Fuzzy barred fledglings peered down at Gary Campbell from a tree, while Kirk Gentalen investigated the grisly remains of a saw-whet’s past meals.…

Reader Tammis Coffin found this colorful tube (and several others like it) on the ground last month at Bartholomew’s Cobble in Sheffield, Massachusetts. Is it a fairy’s trumpet? Nope. What is it?

Sally Naser is the director of conservation restriction (a.k.a. easement) stewardship for The Trustees of Reservations, in Massachusetts. She’s also worked for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy…

This Week in the Woods, we visited our favorite pink lady’s slipper patch and discovered a couple of beautiful beetles crawling on the blossoms. Analeptura lineola, sometimes called the flower…

Picture a robin, out in the morning and hopping around the park. It finds breakfast in the form of a worm, but out of the nearby trees swoops a bigger bird. The bigger bird acts threatening, and the…

By Clare Walker Leslie “After writing twelve books over a period of forty years, I said I was finished. However, my life and the life around me has changed and I felt it time to offer to people…

During World War II, all across the country, women stepped in to fill jobs traditionally performed by the men who had gone to war. One of these women was Virginia Pearson, who in the summer of 1945,…

Dale Brooks says it was Sonny Congdon who taught him how to saw, and so John Rozensky would have helped teach him as well because Sonny and John were working together at that time running…

I climbed the heavy miles of rock hot through the forest up to the gravel avenue through the krummholz, the heat now descending to cooled tundra paved with tiny wildflowers yellow and white and…

For me, the challenges of the pandemic have had a silver lining, directly in my sightline. I have stayed home and kept a journal. Daily, I have re-engaged slow fun, the spin of the planet from one…

For foresters in the Northeast, spring means mud season. In addition to making timber harvesting more difficult, operating heavy equipment during mud season can be detrimental to soil and tree health…

While hiking with my son on Snake Mountain in Addison County, Vermont, I noticed a rather impressive millipede on the trail. When I think “millipede,” I usually think about small,…

It must have felt like summiting a mountain, exhaustion and jubilation at war with each other, only to discover that, well, actually this isn’t the summit yet – and now you have farther to…

As late spring transitions to summer, we typically think of our northern woodlands as bursting with abundant life. But for bears, June into early July is actually a very lean time of year. Early…

Norway Pond is not like the other ponds and lakes scattered around my small New Hampshire community. Those other waterbodies are pristine, with clear, deep water and long, wild stretches filled with…

On a hot July morning on Market Street in Lyme, New Hampshire, Jaxon Morgan leaned against his car bumper swinging a long, black machete through the air. A quiet man with broad gestures, thick white…

In 1926, newlyweds Alva and Mildred Richardson moved to the wilds of New Hampshire. Alva was just starting a job as a U.S. Forest Guard in the recently established White Mountain National Forest…

In 2017, Inland Woods + Trails joined Bike the Borderlands, a collaborative of eight mountain bike organizations located in three states and two countries. The group promotes mountain biking trail…

Weaving a Northern Forest Ethic The earth beneath our feet grounds us, its contours orient us, its waterways guide us. The land is foundational for us all, but the ways we move through and interact…