When the hemlock wooly adelgid, an invasive pest that sucks the life out of eastern hemlock trees, made its appearance in New England forests in the 1970s and 80s, many forestry experts expected it…

Trees capture sunlight to produce chemical energy, and they may soon be teaming up with the sun to produce electricity, as well. A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue…

Riki Moss looks into the forest and imagines another world; a world filled with spirits and ambiguous life forms. For years, she has been engaged with her ever-growing, ever-shifting installment…

Nature writers spend a lot of time celebrating the unknowns in the natural world, those little reminders that we’re not as smart as we think we are. It’s an especially resonant message if…

Reader Penny Harris took this picture in her woods in Cambridge, Vermont. What's the black growth?

One of the hardest parts of writing, or any creative endeavor, is knowing when to crinkle up the paper and start over again. The novelist William Faulkner called this killing your darling. Country…

He stretched his massive neck, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, eyes, and antlers back and forth across the spruce’s overhanging branch tips. Periodically, he would stop, open his eyes,…

If your pulse jolts hearing the rusty cackle of a turkey; if a fly made of “mallard quill thorax ribbed in gold wire ahead of a roughened white hare drubbing, no wing” is your holy grail;…

If you have kids, you know that children’s books about animals usually fall into two camps: There are the basic non-fiction books that give your kids just enough information to raise a million…

Thomas O’Donnell’s reminiscences of his boyhood in a remote lumbering settlement provide an amusing and entertaining description of family life in a nineteenth-century logging camp. The…

On a morning walk around the pond, the dog and I encountered a dead shrew – perhaps the unfortunate casualty of a neighborhood feline or a red fox (shrews are well-known for being distasteful…

We're pleased to announce underwriting support from the Plum Creek Foundation for our popular "Stewardship Stories" article series in Northern Woodlands magazine, starting with the Winter 2013…

Ever since the emerald ash borer (EAB) was discovered in Michigan in 2002, many have speculated about its potential effects on forests in the Northeast. With the confirmation of infestations in…

Who left that soccer ball on the front lawn? Come on, you know it didn’t just grow there. Pretending to confuse a giant puffball mushroom with a soccer ball (or vice versa) is a well-worn joke…

Forestry students might call this "Dendrology at 50 mph." Name the tree species, from left.

We spend a lot of time in our magazine pointing out how the past is reflected in nature, sometimes in subtle ways, like a stand of chestnut oak where once there’d been a forest fire, sometimes…

Photographer Frank Kaczmarek took this photo on a dew-laden, early autumn morning. “One of my favorite web-building spiders is the black and yellow argiope (Argiope aurantia), said Kaczmarek,…

It's mid-October and fall is in full swing: foggy mornings, cold rains, and falling leaves. Time to talk about…tadpoles!? That's right, while we may be accustomed to discussing…

Who funds the Center for Northern Woodlands Education’s work and financially supports our mission? For the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2024, the organization’s $835,000 in…

For those concerned about climate change, renewable energy development is a nobrainer. And the breezy mountaintops of New England, far from human population centers, appear to be ideal settings for…