The large, deep green, lustrous leaves of black walnut give the tree a luxuriant appearance that is more suited to the tropics than to our clime, where, typically, trees are far more restrained.…

Sapwood is the living, outermost portion of a woody stem or branch, while heartwood is the dead, inner wood, which often comprises the majority of a stem’s cross-section. You can usually…

Global warming threatens to profoundly alter our forests, yet forests can also play a vital role in protecting the climate. If strategies for combating climate change, such as the Regional Greenhouse…

Just as there is no grandchild who is not talented, clever, beautiful, and charming, the land that each of us calls home is never ordinary.  After Mary and I bought our land nearly 20 years ago,…

Photo by Catherine Tudish Northern Woodlands is a 501(c)3 public-benefit, non-profit organization. As such, we depend upon the generosity of individuals like you to help make our work possible. The…

Powdered dancer. Wandering globetrotter. Common sand dragon. These are only a few of the exotic creatures encountered by Pam Hunt on her quest last summer. Hunt, a conservation biologist with New…

Kids love the snowy seeds of the milkweed plant. Farmers take a dimmer view, wishing those seeds didn’t colonize their pastures quite so readily. Most everyone else, by and large, ignores…

If you wanted to learn what the local forest was like before Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century, what would you do? One obvious approach would be to visit the few remaining bits of old growth…

In the wooden storage boxes of the University of Vermont’s insect collection, there are plenty of examples of a native bumblebee species (Bombus affinis) that has a black head, broad yellow…

Skilled builders are at work night and day in Vermont and New Hampshire. Some are architects with a flair for design; some are carpenters who cut raw materials to length; some are engineers who create…

I’ve never traveled to Bermuda. It’s not that I have anything against it. It’s just that I feel as if I’ve been there enough already. The most prominent summer weather feature…

I remember walking across a parking lot to my car early one morning about 20 years ago. Under a streetlight was a pile of dead moths, looking a bit like a tiny pile of snow. I was tempted to take a…

A lush, green swath of forest in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountains is not the first place you’d think of as being vital to the science of climate change. But at Hubbard Brook…

My research into the trout populations on the Batten Kill has been sadly incomplete. The Northeast boasts a number of blue-ribbon trout streams, but the Batten Kill is the only one in Vermont. Two…

Waiting for a friend in town, I stood near a broad stone wall of rough-faced blocks of Vermont granite. The hot sun beat down uncomfortably from the south, so I decided to walk around to the other…

Jim Andrews, a herpetologist at Middlebury College, says it is a rare student who can pick out a gray treefrog on a tree when the frog is not calling. Gray treefrogs are masters of disguise. Their…

It’s turning into the year of the sugar maple, at least on our farm in the Connecticut River valley. First came the unexpectedly excellent sugaring season, which had all the makings of a…

Cowbirds, with their sleek brown heads and shiny, black-feathered bodies, even look like they might be up to no good on occasion. New research suggests that indeed, they’ll go to even greater…

There’s sort of a running gag in the Northern Woodlands office: “Who has the copy of New England Wildlife?” Hardly a week goes by without one of us having to raid another’s…

In the old and idiosyncratic genre of wilderness literature, our American masterpiece is Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. As with many perennially great books, when people overcome its…