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Submit Your Photos to the Reader Gallery

You may submit up to three photos per person. While we can’t publish every submission, we carefully consider each one. When reviewing submissions, we look for: A variety of topics and…

Behind the Pages

Dozens of people contribute to creating each issue of Northern Woodlands. Here are a few of the people whose work is featured in the Summer magazine. {image2} Anthony D. Fredericks (Knots & Bolts,…

Zeroing In on Twinflower

Sometimes botanizing can feel like a scavenger hunt. Find a successive set of clues, and you may be rewarded with something rare and beautiful. The clues in these scavenger hunts are the associates,…

Robber Flies

Perched on a leaf, a robber fly (also called assassin fly) waits and watches for any movement in the air. The fly will abandon its perch to capture an insect as it flies past. Once it catches its…

How Native Species Benefit Wildlife

Choosing the right trees to plant – in a yard, park, or other planned space – can be a daunting task. Options include native and non-native species, as well as cultivars bred for traits…

Predicting Roadkill Hotspots

An estimated 4 million miles of vehicular roads run through the United States, and they fragment habitat, alter animal behavior, isolate populations of wildlife, and impose wildlife mortality that is…

Invasive Plants Mirror the Leaf Traits of Native Species

One of the prevailing theories explaining why invasive species do so well in their new homes is that they leave behind most – or all – of their natural predators and pathogens, allowing…

Canis soupus: The Curious Case of Eastern Canines

Prior to colonization, wolves roamed the forests of what is now the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, hunting deer, moose, and caribou in packs. Catamounts stalked deer in these…

Delayed Mowing Gets a Makeover

Grasslands are rare in the Northeast and are either transient or rely on regular disturbance to persist over time. In the heavily forested, pre-colonial landscape, beavers contributed to a limited,…

Box Huckleberry: The Senior Citizen of the Forest

Imagine being around when lumbering mammoths, giant ground sloths, and fearsome saber-toothed cats roamed the North American continent. Imagine living when ancient Egyptians were constructing their…

A Native Species Haven for Wildlife in Jericho

In 2016, after retiring from her work as a veterinarian, Sabina Ernst and her family moved north to Jericho, Vermont. She and her husband, Justin Goggin, purchased a home and 10 acres within sight of…

Carving in Place

My father spent our summer vacations woodcarving. He would set up in front of the cottage, right at the water’s edge, with a piece of wood cradled in his lap – or, if it were large, in the…

Pond Patrol: Keeping an Invasive Bladderwort in Check

On several days throughout summer, a small flotilla of canoes and kayaks gathers on Tilton Pond in central Maine, on the hunt for an uninvited carnivorous plant that has taken hold: swollen…

A Nest Box Lifeline for American Kestrels

In one year, Steve Wheeler put 35,000 miles on his new Chevy pickup. You might think Wheeler has a punishing commute, or perhaps family members scattered across the country. But he racked up most of…

Return of the Giants: Sturgeon Are Making a Comeback in the Northeast

For millennia, a group of prehistoric fishes have been swimming the rivers, lakes, and coastal waters of northeastern North America. These fish – some of them approaching a leviathan-esque 15…

Art Review: Sherrie York

At first look, Sherrie York’s linocut Tern of the Tide is reminiscent of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodcut print The Great Wave (c. 1830). But unlike Hokusai’s piece, York includes…

Quaking Aspen

All spring the tree frogs peeped in the dark, except those seeming lost in the grass by the wooden steps, their bodies like paper. I would let the dog out the back door at night and walk alone up the…

Mud Dauber Wasps

As I was prepping my fall invertebrate zoology course, a colleague mentioned that a local berry farmer had scraped mud dauber wasp nests off an outbuilding and suggested these would be of interest to…

Black Raspberries: The Perfect Bramble

Black raspberries, along with raspberries and blackberries, are among the berries that grow on brambles in the Northeast. Also called blackcaps, black raspberries are the most shade tolerant and…

Forest Succession

Every forest tells a story of disturbance. The trees growing today reflect past hurricanes, abandoned farm fields, insect outbreaks, timber harvests, and even retreating glaciers. Forest succession is…