This group of trees grows along the shoreline of a lake in far northern New York. What species are we looking at?

The Spring issue of Northern Woodlands just reached mailboxes this week, hopefully providing a welcome change of scenery from the wintery conditions outside your window. Among the most hopeful signs…

Recently, we discovered this barred owl near the Northern Woodlands office – dead, frozen, and wedged in a tree cavity roughly four feet from the ground. The head was pulled back into its…

Act One opens in a forest on the western slopes of the Taconic Mountains in southwestern Vermont. A man in his forties is walking with his former high-school geology teacher – a man now in his…

Each year that we run the West Branch of the Penobscot into the big lake, I think, this will be the last time. Our canoes packed for the four-day trip, we slide into the river at Old Roll Dam and let…

Upstairs in the Northern Woodlands office hangs a copy of Charles Joseph Minard’s map depicting France’s 1812 invasion of Russia. It’s a remarkable work, both for the story that it…

A couple of months ago I heard Thor Hanson interviewed on the radio and he said – maybe not exactly, but close – that “Keeping honey bees does little or nothing for bee conservation.…

I have an old farm field that seems to want to be a white pine nursery. If I didn’t brushhog it once a year, the trees would take over in no time. As it is, the seedlings are so dense in places…

It used to be that in order to see or photograph wildlife, you’d have to be either incredibly lucky or spend hours crouched behind a blind. But now, thanks to the wide availability of high-tech…

A new tool has been approved in the fight to control invasive pale and black swallowworts, and it’s a good sign for monarch butterflies. The natural enemy of the swallowworts is a Hypena moth…

A few winters back, there was a doe who frequented our compost heap. The garden fence around it proved an inadequate barrier, as she simply hopped over it to nosh on the rotting shards of…

Patricia Liddle took this photo recently in Canaan, New York. Any idea what caused these horizontal deformities in the maple?

Beaver dams, ice formations, and winter wildlife were common themes for January. A sun dog glowed in the Pennsylvania sky, and a mostly-white squirrel haunted a Vermont feeder. In Maine, coyotes…

Earlier this winter, Paul Smith College’s Adirondack Watershed Institute (AWI) published a report on water quality for 21 lakes in Hamilton County. The county occupies the lower, central portion…

En plein air is the French term for painting outdoors; it translates as “in the open air.” This method of painting became popular in the late nineteenth century with the Dutch painter…

Maintaining a sharp chainsaw chain not only makes for faster cutting, it also reduces wear and tear on the saw and the sawyer. Given those obvious benefits, it still surprises me to see people…

THE LOSS OF ASH IS FELT BEYOND THE FOREST With snow on the ground in mid-March, trees in Connecticut’s Naugatuck State Forest presented a dense network of bare branches against a sky the color…

On winter mornings when I look out my window, I often see a gray squirrel clinging upside down to the post supporting my bird feeder, with his front paws in the tray, munching sunflower seeds.…

Had a unicorn pranced across the trail in front of me, I wouldn’t have been surprised. It was one of those sparkly winter days, when snow drapes fir trees and glints across the landscape. I was…

What are these football-shaped objects, about .75 inch to 1 inch long, scattered on the snow of a dry site in the Taconic Mountains of Vermont?