Here’s a tip: Found earlier this summer in Vermont.

One of the hazards of working at Northern Woodlands is that people are constantly asking you tricky nature questions. There I’ll be, happily moseying along a trail and someone will spring a rare…

A living jewel hangs suspended beneath the microscope. An emerald sheen shifts with its every pulsing breath over iridescent silver, gold, and bronze swirls. Aquamarine legs hang poised, deftly…

No one could fault you for running away, screaming in terror, if you saw a large, flying, cigar-shaped insect armed with a “stinger” bigger than a sewing needle. Thankfully, the female…

When the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, no one is fooled in the North Country. Those first, yellowish daffodil leaves at the edge of a melting snow bank? Best to ignore them. The…

In assaying wooded land, foresters observe, measure, describe, and map the forest, delineating it into smaller areas – or management units – known as stands. In this way, a forest is seen…

The silhouette of a moose is noticeably different from that of its deer cousins. Its bulky, hunched body sits on tall, improbably proportioned legs. And then there’s that nose. It’s long…

In the 1980s, in the midst of the last spruce budworm outbreak, the pulp and paper industry in Maine and eastern Canada faced an unprecedented softwood shortfall. The insect was killing millions of…

For those of you who aren’t following the battle to ban bear baiting in Maine, here’s a quick recap. The Humane Society of the United States and a coalition of smaller local animal rights…

Jan Van Meter recently spotted “two of these white balls with pink nodes” attached to the twigs of a white oak in southern New York.

My greenhouse has had a lot of jobs over the years. Originally, it was intended to grow greens in winter and start seedlings in spring. Later, it served as a barn for sheep and goats. Now, it has…

“We had an old Corley semi-automatic carriage mill in a little 40-by-80-foot building when we started,” said Dave Buxton, who founded New England Forest Products (NEFP) with his wife,…

I’m always entranced watching the hunting behavior of long-legged wading birds like great blue herons and snowy egrets. They stand motionless for long minutes at the edge of a pond or swamp,…

This April, as part of Northern Woodlands’ spring fundraising effort, we published a quiz with nine mystery photos and challenged readers to identify any three of them in a line (à la…

Twenty years ago, I planted 1,600 black walnut seedlings on a site a few miles outside of Barre, in central Vermont. Four years later, I planted another 700. A dairy farm had operated on the site for…

Once, hiking on the west coast, I picked up a big, bright yellow banana slug from the forest floor and brought it to my wife. She remembers that too – vividly. Ok, ok, I know, snails and slugs…

Four thousand years ago, the native people of North America’s eastern woodlands cultivated a protein-rich superfood. Variously called lamb’s-quarters, goosefoot, or pigweed, the plant…

Red and Georgia were sitting on the lip of a Long Trail lean-to together, while the rest of us were massed on a nearby picnic table eating lunch. Red was a 20-something Irish-looking kid with a kind…

It’s metal, it’s rusty, and it’s hollow. This is a section of a longer piece found in the woods in southern Vermont. What is it?

“She’s so cute!” a little girl coos to the snowy white owl. The owl blinks languidly, ignoring her admirer. No doubt she is used to human attention, as she is one of the more popular…