After the leaves fall in October, the mountains that rise toward the Canadian border north of Jackman, Maine, begin to wear their maple like a fuzzy, gray wool blanket. Sugar and red maple are…

I was enjoying a morning cup of coffee in the sunroom when I saw the hawk. It was perched across the road, maybe 30 yards away, its chest puffed up against the cold. It appeared to be eyeing the…

Everett Towle is retired, but plenty active. As a sixth generation resident of Buxton, Maine, Towle inherited several parcels of forestland. He added more over the years, and now owns eight different…

Until the 1940s, most Christmas trees were cut from forests. Now they’re harvested from tree plantations. The maple sugarbush may soon be making a similar move from forest to field. In 2009, Tim…

Every year, in mid-March, my family leaves Vermont and heads to Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley to get a jump on experiencing spring. Red-winged blackbirds are calling, chipmunks are foraging and…

A reader in southern Vermont submitted this collection of seven different cones (not all were found in the forest). Can you ID them all from left to right?

As our sugaring operation grows, it gets harder to tell where one season ends and the next begins. From a production standpoint, last season ended on April 9, 2013, which is a logical place to draw a…

Deep in the heart of the last ice age, at the bottom of a glacial lake, the clay babies were born. Before I tell you exactly what a clay baby is, here’s how to find one. Take a stroll along the…

In Fairlee, Vermont, there’s a 540-acre stretch of former glacier called Lake Morey. If a loon on that lake pointed his bill northwest, flew straight as the idiomatic crow, and kept flapping for…

The scientific process is a long and complex trail that sometimes leads to dead-ends and conflicting results before clear conclusions can be drawn. Throw in a dose of climate change to muddy the…

Many places have fantastical creatures: the Loch Ness monster in Scotland, Sweden’s skvader (half hare, half wood grouse), and, of course, the Pacific Northwest’s tree octopus. The state…

Fifteen years ago, on its centennial anniversary, The National Audubon Society recognized 100 “Champions of Conservation” in the twentieth century. All are individuals who have worked…

Three tom turkeys vie for the attention of one hen. If puffed out feathers, red wattles, fanned tails and lowered wings don’t win her over, a repertoire of nonvocal “hums” and…

Some of the timberland my family owns abuts state forest. On our side of the property line is a thoroughly ordinary mix of beech, red maple, and white pine. Mixed age, but pretty young; the whole…

As the sunset colors fade from purple to black, the forest is dimly illuminated by a first quarter moon. An eerie sound breaks the calm. It is not the long, low, slow howling of wolves that can be…

Bob Chandler came across this scene on a logging job in Maine.

We hear all the time about how winter’s disappearing in this era of climate change (The New York Times recently ran a piece called “The End of Snow?”), so I can’t help but…

The Maple Industry Reaches Its Boiling Point, Harvard’s Old Growth Laboratory, Wood on the Move, Mystical Creatures, Building a Better Peavey, Waiting for Ice Out, and much more

Black birch tea was one of the first wild foods I ever tried. Some high school friends boiled pots of birch twigs to make what they called “brew” while telling jokes and stories over the…

Log truckers have nothing to haul if loggers aren’t cutting wood, and the rain this past summer kept loggers out of the woods for weeks at a time. Don Moore, Jr., a log truck operator from East…