A deer died by the river near my home. The crows found it, as did other scavengers – a bald eagle, and two big brown raptors that were hard to identify. Both had white flecking on their heads,…

Nineteenth century author Henry David Thoreau marveled at the huge beast he saw deep in the Maine woods. Hoof to withers, the bull stood nearly seven feet tall – taller than the biggest horse.…

It’s spring, and the snowpack is retreating. But it’s not just coltsfoot and trout lily that are emerging from beneath the melting snow. Over the years I’ve found plastic oil jugs,…

All of a sudden, sap season is here and winter’s on its way out. Chances are though, a few more snow or ice squalls are still to come. The next time you find yourself driving behind a big plow…

What explains this pattern that forester Beth Daut spotted in the snow?

There’s still an element of magic in sugaring, still plenty of things we don’t understand. Take how weather relates to a run. The book says you need a freeze-thaw cycle to build pressure…

Your March photos included a great image of a beaver, squirrel acrobatics, and a turkey mob that never received, or perhaps ignored, that memo about sharing the road. From loggers to sugarmakers, many…

Walking through the woods on a cool spring morning, I saw a barred owl in an old maple tree. I circled the owl three times from a distance. Its head kept turning to follow me, tracking my movements…

We don’t typically think of forest debris as a food source for freshwater fish and other aquatic organisms, but a study by researchers at the University of Cambridge in England suggests that it…

For nearly 20 years, Gary Lovett has kept a journal with notes about a variety of natural events taking place in his backyard in southeastern New York, including the date that spring peepers begin…

Maple syrup producers no longer have to wait for spring weather to know if they are likely to have a good year. A postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University has revealed that sugar maple seed…

The transition from February to March is not subtle. With hardly time to recover from a truncated month, we attend Town Meeting, cede an hour to our clocks, and navigate spontaneously erupting frost…

Glen Roberts noticed this white pine while working in the woods in New York. Why does it look like this?

So we got our first run the end of last week, and made our first syrup on March 14. That was also the day we finally finished tapping, thanks in large part to our friends Ginny and Court who traveled…

Life can be rough for the bobolink, a charismatic grassland bird whose population is declining. Halting that decline is a challenge for North American ornithologists. After all, bobolinks spend about…

If you peek into a wood duck nesting box during the breeding cycle, you might find 10 to 11 eggs, which is the bird’s normal clutch size. But you might also stumble upon a box overflowing with…

How Long Is Forever? And Can Anything Be Done in the Meantime? My wife and I own a 100-acre farm in eastern Vermont, where we raise and sell lambs, chickens, vegetables, honey, maple syrup, firewood,…

A guy down the road has been working in his woods for the last couple of years. He’s cleaning them up. And I mean cleaning. He cuts the underbrush. Takes out the dead trees, the downed logs, the…

What’s going on up there?

We usually start tapping our sugarwoods around February 1. This year it was five below zero that morning, and so there was no rush getting out there. If it’s too cold when you tap, you can split…