We boiled our first sap of the year on February 21, and once it started, it ran pretty consistently until last Wednesday. By March 1 we’d made half a crop; we’re now at about 60 percent.…

Your February photos featured carnivore valentines - coyotes, foxes, and bobcats all paired up. Prayer flags glowed on a gray birch, a hermit warbler showed up in Connecticut, and Todd Bauman made a…

Thanksgiving 2015, the first since my husband’s death, we climb the hill to offer him the last cider of the season. Our granddaughter pours the libation around the homemade grave, on creeping…

The bare ground of the trail wound through dead leaves and patchy snow. At a short overhang in the trail, I noticed spiky threads of ice growing up from the soil in crunchy clusters. A careless boot…

Our brains filter and sort what we see to help us understand things. We edit out a plethora of information in order to clarify and organize the world. Carolyn Enz Hack is interested in the layers of…

“We were exploring a remote wetland within the Brushwood Community Forest in West Fairlee, Vermont,” says Susan C. Morse, who captured this shot. “I was bringing up the rear and…

I’m writing this in late January, right about the time that we’re starting the woods work for the coming sugaring season. Ours is a family maple operation that my father and grandfather…

Last March, I kept company with a red-breasted nuthatch who hunted insects on a dying sugar maple outside the Northern Woodlands office. My second floor window provided a close-up view of the trunk,…

In college, I spent a summer building hand-hewn Adirondack lean-tos. The work required both precision and persuasion. We’d chisel perfect saddle notches, which often meant rolling the log in…

You’re walking alongside a beaver flowage and encounter large mustelid tracks – a bounding pattern along the bank for more than 100 yards. Then the tracks cross the broad frozen pond,…

At this time of year, many a gardener’s daydreams turn to the springtime promise of sprouting plants. Seed catalogs start arriving in the mail months before the soil will be thawed and drained…

Man and Nature: Bushwhacking to the Source, Red Spruce Rising, The Beaver Family of Doolittle Creek, Home Burial – Back to the Land, Six Feet Under, Mill “Waste”, CCC: A Legacy of…

What’s protruding from this birch?

This is my fifth year writing a sugaring journal for this editor’s blog, and one of the nice things about having a written record of an annual event is that you can go back and check your notes.…

Over the last 35 years, Phyllis Austin has earned a well-deserved reputation as Maine’s premier journalist covering forestry and environmental issues. In 2008, she published her first major…

The Forest Unseen is, at first glance, a painstaking scientific exploration into the lives of organisms inhabiting a one-meter circle of rocky, old-growth forest floor – but that is just the…

Not so very long ago, collecting the eggs of birds was one of the most common activities in the life of budding young naturalists. However, with the passage of such foundational conservation…

In 1995, the Vermont legislature created the wildlife conservation license plate. Now, 20 years later, more than $2.5 million has been raised from the sale of these plates; the money goes to statewide…

“Just after the snow melts away but before the growing season starts, the northwoods is vulnerable to wildfire. As a volunteer firefighter, I was assigned to a crew to extinguish hotspots after…

Editor's note: This blog is by our friend Janet Pesaturo, a writer, educator, and CyberTracker certified wildlife tracker. Check out her wildlife tracking programs here. Foxes are sometimes said…