On cold winter days, feeding sticks of firewood into my woodstove, I sometimes pause, my eye caught by lichens. Splotchy circles, lacy tendrils. Soft gray, muted gray-green, black. They mottle the…

In the shadows of a February dawn, not far from the town of Greenville, Maine, wildlife biologist Henning Stabins of Plum Creek Timber Company and his colleagues were in search of Lynx canadensis,…

The hemlock woolly adelgid remains near the top of the list of harmful pest insects in eastern forests. It has significantly damaged the hemlocks in 2.5 million acres of hemlock-dominated forests in…

Michael Low knows intimately every footstep of his 67-acre Green Fire Farm. He has worked this land for a dozen years, and his wife and business partner, Hart Brent, has been here a decade longer,…

Birdwatchers in the Northeast have long known that some species of finch that spend most of their lives in the boreal forest occasionally travel far beyond their normal range. Pine siskins, red…

The Boke of St. Albans, a 15th century sportsman’s handbook, decreed that only a nobleman could hunt with a falcon, but a mere yeoman might settle for a goshawk. These days it is the very…

It looks a bit like a golf ball that’s been run over, but what really caused this growth?

Your January photos included a number of intriguing ice formations, including a rare look at pancake ice. A pink-footed goose flew in from Europe, a coyote stopped by the yard for a morning visit, and…

This past autumn, Northern Woodlands circulated a “woods savvy” quiz, with the promise to announce the winners today. The quiz featured 10 multiple choice questions, and we had a lot of…

In the photo, the mountain lion lies on its side on the shoulder of a Connecticut parkway. Tail lights shine in the distance. A Connecticut state trooper snapped the photo after a motorist had struck…

Last night, the floodlights were on at my favorite skating lake. Several children wearing plastic skates and shiny helmets were gliding on the ice, shepherded by young parents. A father pulled a…

I think I speak for all of us in expressing thanks for the natural order that’s been restored by January’s cold. Two weekends ago I was still afraid to walk on the lake ice around here. By…

Ken Kinder took this photo in late fall in northern Vermont. What was the purpose of the project?

Say you want to know how long a fallen tree takes to completely decompose. You could walk into the woods, cut a tree down, and return to check on it, say, once a month, for 10, 50, maybe even 100…

As scavengers, vultures rely on leftovers that hunters, both animal and human, leave behind. And when they feed on carcasses or gut-piles of animals that were killed with lead bullets, they’re…

Editor’s Note: This blog is by our friend Don Wharton; check out Don’s story on Adirondack hermits in our Winter 2015 issue. Six or seven years ago, a friend and I made a concerted effort…

Burdock (Arctium lappa) fits the anti-foraging stereotype: – big, bitter leaves, tough and weedy, with an ugly, gnarled root. “And you want to eat that?” people ask. “Really,…

Somehow trees put up with all manner of injury and assault during their lives. They have to: they are rooted in place and cannot move to avoid injury. Whether it’s ice- or wind-stripped branches…

I’m an enthusiastic, if laid-back, bird watcher. One of the things I love most about spring and summer is the effortlessness with which I encounter a wide variety of birds. Sitting in my…

On a warm, sunny day last spring, just a few weeks before the end of the school year, professional timber framer Makaio Maher stood in a small clearing in a stand of red pine trees in Newport,…