On the seventh of December, men stood in the garage and said: “Yep, snow before Pearl Harbor Day; it’s gonna be a good winter.”  Then, armed with electrical cords, blow torches,…

Though they were spotted this fall at the Maine Tree Farm of the Year event at the Hidden Valley Nature Center, these forest pests seem appropriately festive for this time of year. Can you name them…

Why Do Evergreen Needles Look So Different From Deciduous Leaves? Ask anybody to draw a leaf and damn few would draw a pine, spruce, hemlock, or fir needle, and even fewer would draw the green scales…

Walking through a large chain store this past October – at least a week before Halloween – I stumbled upon a display of decorations. Not witches and pumpkins, but trees and bells.…

Tracking appeals to us because we enjoy sorting out nature’s subtle clues – clues that lead us to visualize and appreciate the behavior of different wildlife species. Simple tracks of…

Every year, I eagerly await the winter solstice, which this year falls on December 21. My anticipation is driven not from an affection for winter, but a hunger for sunlight. I want the ever-shrinking…

Why are there stripes on this forest floor following a light dusting of snow?

I went through a wicked dinosaur phase in my pre-teen years, and was convinced that if my future as an NFL quarterback didn’t materialize I’d make a lateral career move and become a…

One fall a young beaver, probably a two-year-old kicked out by its parents, built a small lodge in the old mill pond below our house. On cold January days when temperatures were below zero, I looked…

Maine's Native American basketmakers have brought a tradition back to life. For Jeremy Frey, of Maine’s Passamaquoddy Indian tribe, weaving ash baskets is a family tradition. He learned to…

Growing up, I never got along that well with school, but I always loved to read and especially loved to read hunting stories, which were their own genre back then. Wilson Rawls’ Where the Red…

I manage a lodge in the Groton forest on behalf of Vermont State Parks. One warm fall day, while standing outside the lodge, I noticed movement inside one of the window wells around the basement.…

Meghan Oliver found this on her dog after a walk in the woods in early November. What is it?

A maple leaf frozen in time (and ice) near the edge of a small pond in northern New Hampshire. “The blue seen in the shot is the reflection of a cloudless sky,” said Kaczmarek. “The…

Susan Morse has contributed to this magazine since its early years. One of her first articles appeared in our Winter 1997 issue. The topic was lynx. The opening paragraph mentioned her involvement in…

I had never thought of eastern hemlock as a forest giant until I visited the mountains of western North Carolina. In my northern New England experience, an old-growth hemlock was a good-sized tree,…

When I was a kid, we stopped by neighboring sugarhouses a few times a year to pick up a gallon of Grade B. I’d hold the plastic jug in my lap on the ride home, and on a few of those lucky trips,…

Follow-the-dream memoirs comprise a good chunk of North Country literature – probably because so many of us came here looking for a better life. Taproot is one such book, and from the first page…

What is the definition of environmental art? The simplest, shortest explanation is that it is art that addresses environmental or ecological concerns. Historically, environmental art grew out of a…

My old boss Walter Medwid recently published this op-ed raising the issue of Fish and Wildlife funding in Vermont. It’s a wonky issue, I’ll grant you, but it’s something that…