In November 12, 2014, an unmanned European spacecraft by the name of “Philae” landed on a comet named Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) as it was hurtling across the galaxy at a speed of…

There is an all-natural material, produced at room temperature, that can be used to build homes, to make protective coverings, to hunt and trap, and even to swing through the air. It’s…

We’re doing a big story on white pine blister rust in the Autumn issue, and in tracking down art for the piece came across a cool old type-written report on eastern white pine that was published…

Colorful, yes, but what is it?

On a recent afternoon, I was driving on my road in Thetford when I saw a baby ruffed grouse about the size of a pin cushion scurry into the bushes. I had the same impulse I did as a 10-year-old when I…

A nesting robin was incessantly scolding something that was moving along the length of a downed log. I knelt and studied the area, and soon saw a flash of white, and thereafter the recognizable…

On a recent damp May morning I walked around Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, with arborist Brian Beaty. While he is responsible for all of the trees in the center of the campus, our visit…

When we see wood with funky colors and grain patterns we tend to assume it came from the tropics. But these three boards were milled from species growing in Vermont. Left to right, tell us the wood…

The birch bark peelers arrived in a pickup pulling a covered trailer. There was a 4-wheeler in it, a smaller trailer, and sheets of cardboard and stickers for the bark. They unloaded the 4-wheeler and…

This June was an exceptionally wet month in the Northeast, and many of your photos had a water theme. Love was in the air for promethea moths, and sawdust was in the air for a kid taking his first…

Biologists sometimes field questions about a “huge scary bug” that appeared in someone’s home or worse yet on their person. Most turn out to be benign organisms that ended up in the…

The evening was warm, even for August, and the pitcher for the home team Lowell Spinners was having trouble finding the plate. Millions of white mayflies, disoriented by the bright lights of the…

I’m not the type to crave foods, wild or otherwise, but on the hottest days of summer when the cicadas are whirring, I do get a serious hankering for sumac-ade. No wild drink is easier to…

Gone are the days when many in the Northeast relied on pitch pine, and in many cases, gone are the trees themselves. But you can still find this historic tree with the alligator-scale-like bark if you…

When you think of foxes (if you ever do), you likely picture the ginger-coated red fox, like Mr. Tod from Beatrix Potter’s fantastical children’s tales, only without the dapper suitcoat…

What is this (or rather, what will it be)?

I went on vacation this past week down to southern Massachusetts, a place that’s really a different world to a guy from Vermont: the land flat or gently rolling towards the sea; the vegetation…

Tracy Moskovitz and Bambi Jones just can’t seem to stop buying land. It started innocently enough in 1978, “when Bambi went down to the Post Office and talked to the clerk and she came…

While observing the antics of a litter of red fox kits, I witnessed an encounter between the kits’ mother and a very large raccoon. The vixen started barking incessantly when she saw the…

I’m out hunting an unlikely target: mosquitoes. At each stop along the road, I pull on a bug net and gaiters, wrestle a cylindrical vacuum and battery pack onto my shoulder, and head to my…