In my neighborhood, there are biennial outbreaks of plant-eating apparitions. Let me explain. “Apparition” in Greek is phasma: we see biannual outbreaks of phasmids, the leaf eating…

On Sunday afternoon, I picked up Castle Freeman’s Go With Me, and started reading it around 4:00. I finished sometime after 9:00, stopping only to throw more wood in the woodstove. I…

Satellite technology and geographic information systems (GIS) now allow us to accurately show how much of a landscape is paved or covered with impervious surfaces. “Paved” is just what it…

Human history is peppered with movements. There were the big ones: abolition, civil rights, suffrage, environmental protection. And then there were the myriad little ones, which together have brought…

“Stop the car and back up!” my wife, Edie, exclaimed. “I think I saw something in the pasture.” The wet pasture, by a sluggish little stream, contained numerous clumps of tall…

In your travels, you have probably seen the easily recognizable “Tree Farm” sign on white posts along the roadsides of woodlands or on the gable ends of farm buildings or sugarhouses.…

Unlike spring, summer, fall, and winter, mud season has no official start and end dates. Still, it is a predictable part of the logger’s year, signaling the temporary close to a season of work…

There’s been a great deal of talk about the economic stimulus package, and specifically about the checks that began arriving in our mailboxes in May. I like to think of Northern Woodlands as an…

An important skill for any woodland owner who is preparing to sell some wood is understanding how wood volumes are measured. There are ways to measure live wood “on the stump” that are…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust the…

If, when quietly wandering around outdoors, you have ever heard and tried to track down a rhythmic, grating sound, thinking you were in search of a small rodent or perhaps a cricket, only to find that…

As far as trees are concerned, root damage is the root of all evil. Well, most of it, anyway. No matter what symptoms are visible – early fall color (a sign of stress), sudden death of branches,…

Sitting in Paul and Sandal Cate’s living room in East Montpelier, Vermont, you are literally surrounded by Paul’s life-work: a forestry philosophy put into action. The outer walls are…

Also called sweet birch, cherry birch, or mahogany birch, this species is perhaps the only tree around that is best recognized by the flavor of its twigs. The inner bark, as any twig-chewing child can…

We are easy to spot. Look for boots spattered with blue paint. Blue paint dots our wool hats in the winter and speckles our hair and baseball caps in the summer. In the fall, because the accumulation…

“There’s a place called Faraway Meadow We never shall mow in again, Or such is the talk at the farmhouse: The meadow is finished with men.” —From “The Last Mowing,”…

There’s no shortage of studies about the effects of timber harvesting on amphibians. And there’s not much discrepancy between studies: generally, the heavier the cut, the fewer frogs,…

When a plant or animal is moved from its native homeland to a new territory, and it thrives to the detriment of native plants and animals in that territory, it’s known as an invasive species.…

The poet Ogden Nash put it succinctly: “God in His wisdom / Made the fly / And then forgot / To tell us why.” True, it’s blackfly season, which is perhaps not the best time of year…

I live something of a double life: member of the Northern Woodlands team by day and owner/operator of an organic vegetable farm by night. (Time-wise, it’s actually the other way around.) …