If you take a walk through a thick, broadleaf forest on a cool summer morning, you might recognize the cascading, metallic song of a thrush called a veery. It is an ethereal sound that echoes through…

This week in the woods, we’ve been enjoying the company of little wood satyrs. These early summer forest butterflies will be gone by mid-July, so now is the time to look for them in forest…

At Marcus Whitman High School in Rushville, New York, students who are enrolled in a college-level environmental science class participate in hands-on projects – from making maple syrup to…

We found this insect trundling across the parking lot at the Northern Woodlands office recently. What is it? (For extra credit, what’s that yellow stuff on its body?)

Your May images showed spring in full fling. In Rockingham, Vermont, Chantal Caron observed a downy woodpecker chick (no doubt complaining about its parents’ slow food service) and in…

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, / And here on earth come emulating flies, / That though they never equal stars in size, / (And they were never really stars at heart) / Achieve at times a…

This week in the woods, white-tailed deer’s new antlers are becoming more noticeable as they grow. In this buck’s case, his antler nubs have just reached the moment when they touch the…

On a foggy morning walk, it may seem as if the spider webs on your path have turned into jeweled wonders, every thread a string of gems as smooth as pearls and as sparkling as diamonds. Each of these…

In the third week of May, the Connecticut River Upper Valley experienced two unseasonably cold nights in a row, and in some places temperatures dropped to the low twenties or lower. This freeze killed…

This map of MillionTreesNYC Afforestation study sites across New York City, includes the sites mentioned in Catherine Schmitt’s article, In the City, a Million Trees Take Root. The map…

“There is, I think, great hope for the continued presence of nature in the metropolis.” — Elizabeth Barlow, The Forests and Wetlands of New York City, 1971 Surrounded by a grid of…

“When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a…

It was August in northern New York, and the leaves still shone an optimistic green. But Labor Day was closing in, and my wife Lisa and I would soon join millions of other parents as empty nesters: our…

One of the most common questions that foresters get is, “How old is this tree?” Often, the response is less than satisfactory, as the forester carries on about site characteristics,…

White-tailed deer are so abundant in the eastern United States that it may be hard to believe the species was absent in many areas, including most of the Northeast, just a century ago. Nationwide,…

While walking in a milkweed patch at dusk, Tig Tillinghast found a flower crab spider that had just ambushed and immobilized a fly. “It was difficult to get adequate depth for this photo,”…

Mere hours old, a comical procession of 12 downy puffs drop one by one from their nest cavity 30 feet high in a white ash snag. Scrambling to keep up with their mother, a female wood duck, they head…

While orb webs – with their appealing spiral geometry – are the most familiar, spiderwebs take an amazing diversity of forms, each an ingenious fit for its maker’s hunting style and…

Two of the regular columns in the Summer 2023 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine are related to northeastern bats. Forest Insights describes opportunities to promote summer bat habitat in forests,…

I’ve seen some bats flying around the edge of my woods, and I’d really like to help them because I know that they’ve been hit pretty badly by white-nose syndrome. Where are they…