“Perhaps the passage of time is a kind of healing, or a kind of salvation granted equally to all people.”—Mizuki Nomura Inari, Finland, is the cultural center of the Sami – the…

The history of agriculture is written all over the woods of southern and central New England. Old stone walls grid the landscape and seem to tie disparate stands of second-growth forest together;…

John Adler happens to be a logger, but more inherently he’s a thinker. Spend a little time with him and you quickly realize that whether he had chosen to be a banker, a builder, whatever, he…

By mid-May each year I begin to look forward to the return of the alder flycatchers that nest in the willows along the stream near our house. Usually the last migrant to arrive on our property, this…

Oak and Light, Yankee Tarheels: Pitch Pine in Colonial America, Turtles, Creek Dipping in the White Mountains, The Hatch, ATVs: Recreation and Conservation, and much more

Thanks to Kyle Jones for sending in this photo. What is he holding?

I went to a tick talk last night in southwestern Vermont that was sponsored by Bennington College and the Bennington County Sustainable Forestry Consortium. Kathleen LoGiudice, a researcher affiliated…

I’ve had my eye on this maple in my woods for some time. Not because it’s a beautiful timber tree. It’s only about eight inches in diameter, after all. But, it has an interesting…

In 1936, the United States was still struggling to escape the Great Depression. And things were especially bad in Groveton, New Hampshire – a paper mill town. Groveton’s mill fell two…

Three things happened this week: bluebirds and tree swallows returned, my road was graded, and the red maple buds popped. It’s time to search for vernal pools. Vernal pools are small areas of…

An animal was eating the bark near the crown of this sumac tree. What kind of animal was it?

You do this job long enough and you turn into Andy Rooney, I’ve decided, which is to say that you slowly become some crotchety old guy who gets mad at the news and wants to tell everyone about…

This month's photos showed, at long last, the woods waking up. Amphibians mated in vernal pools, bees ventured from their hives and bright green ramps popped up among the brown, snow-flattened…

There are times when fish appear telepathic. Consider the uncanny way a school of bait fish moves as one to avoid a predator, or the way goldfish in their lighted bowl turn towards the glass when…

How New England's Forests Arrived, Where They Came From, and What it Means for The Future Sometime around 12,000 years ago, the first human beings arrived in New England. We don’t know much…

It was early, even for the birds, when photographer Bill Byrne and I arrived at Jim Conkey’s sawmill in New Salem, Massachusetts. C & M Rough Cut is nestled in the woods just a stone’s…

Scratch and then sniff a black or yellow birch twig, and the pleasant aroma will likely put a smile on your face. What you are smelling is oil of wintergreen (methyl salicylate). This chemical…

We’ll try to make this the last WITWIT photo of the season with snow in it. At least the white background makes things clearer! Can you identify the sources of this scat (from left to right)?

We boiled for the last time this season last Saturday – a raw, cold day. It froze hard that night, but Sunday rose up into the 60s. It felt like the end of sugaring season and the first day of…

There’s no mistaking the stinging nettle. Sure, its paired, heart-shaped, coarsely-toothed leaves are easy to spot. But it’s the painful burning sensation one gets from even a light brush…