When mud season arrives, I go out at sunset wearing khakis and a brown-checked jacket. I wait in the brush of a hedgerow that trails down to a wet meadow. The sky turns salmon, then fades to gray as…

One sunny day last spring, I was prowling around the land in central New York where my ancestors had farmed. A few years earlier, my brother and my uncle had found the barn’s foundation, or what…

Coastal northern California, with its rainy, temperate climate and rugged terrain, is home to some of the oldest – and tallest – trees in North America. These ancient trees, mostly…

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…

Donald Kroodsma began his life’s work while in graduate school almost 40 years ago when he tried to figure out how a Bewick’s wren learned his songs. Does he learn songs from his father or…

Kermit the Frog once sang, “It’s not easy bein’ green.” His melancholy was well placed. It is not a good time to be a frog: the world over, frogs and other amphibians are dying…

Rare is the day when all the resources that a tree needs are available in abundance. And for jack pine, a far more frugal and less aggressive species than, say, sugar maple, survival depends on…

I was in the passenger seat, being driven up a driveway by a real estate agent in 1995. I looked southward through the open car window toward a wide valley encircled by beautiful mountains and fell in…

Modern chainsaws are the product of 40 years of evolution. Manufacturers’ continued focus on safety and productivity has produced saws that have a number of safety features that might not be…

Imagine yourself driving into a North Country town one afternoon and finding a business there that employed 92,771 people and turned out $14.4 billion in manufactured products. You’d probably…

It’s only natural to take a human-centered view of the world. Through this lens, Lyme disease is a ferocious malady that is on the march north. In New Hampshire, researchers recently found that…

Tom Powers, a retired Air Force tech sergeant and a member of the Peru Town Council, keeps an eye on a wide range of issues that affect this northeastern New York town – zoning problems, the…

Acid rain leaches calcium and other nutrients from forest ecosystems. In places where soil calcium levels are naturally low, where acid rain inputs are high, or especially where both these conditions…

Reports are increasing about the impact of world-wide deforestation on global warming. A correspondent for the U.K. news magazine, The Economist, for example, wrote in a special edition titled…

Counting fishers in the rugged terrain of New York’s Adirondack Mountains is tough on scientists – and on the fishers. A new technique, which identifies fishers through prints of their…

Also called birch bracket, this distinctive fungus only grows on birches, looks like nothing else that grows on birches, and is very common. Also in its favor from the human perspective is that it is…

Tree bark can act as a record of all sorts of events: lightning, fire, mechanical scrapes, and even the brief spark of youthful passion, carved with pocketknife, complete with heart, arrow, and…

Sheldon and Penelope Pennoyer will tell you they moved to their hilltop land in Greenfield, New Hampshire, because they wanted their boys to do farm chores. Back when their first child was born,…

Knots in trees occur where a branch has been surrounded by continued growth of the bole. When the bole is sawn into lumber, or peeled to make veneer, the branch sections included in the lumber or…

“The arrival of the emerald ash borer is seemingly imminent, and there are no known methods of control,” warns Peter Smallidge of New York’s Cooperative Extension service at Cornell…