This spinning jenny is sitting high in a sugarbush. Why?

The seed dispersal habits of small mammals have long been known to have a significant bearing on the health and growth of forests. A doctoral student at the University of Maine has found that the…

A team of researchers studying snowpack decline found that snowless winters leave trees stunted. In a series of forest manipulation experiments begun in 2007 at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in…

The view – sacrosanct in many indigenous cultures – that the natural, material world is animate not inert, has long been considered as heresy by conventional Euro-American theologians and…

When we talk about trees, we often talk about the wilder among them, the rarer, the grander. And although beech trees can be wild and grand, they aren’t exactly rare. Pioneers in the understory,…

The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild Tom Seeley is an authority on honey bees. His wonderful book Honey Bee Democracy describes how bees decide on a new home and Wisdom of the Hive is about…

On a walk one winter afternoon, I spotted two white objects darting across a snow-covered field. White on white, they were difficult to identify at first. It was a short-tailed weasel chasing a…

I have always admired nature’s mutineers: animals and plants that thwart the recognized system and do their own thing. As a child I was the sole member of my own duck-billed platypus club,…

Bonnie Honaberger found this mystery bundle attached to a winter branch. What is it?

Geoff Dennis lives in Little Compton, Rhode Island, where he makes a living as a commercial fisherman. He’s also an avid photographer and birder, two hobbies that converged in 1995, when he…

In your January photos, birds dined on frozen fruit, a fisher inspected a yard, and a ten-point buck celebrated the end of hunting season. A boy tried out new snowshoes given by his grandfather,…

With pantlegs stuffed into our boots to ward off ticks, my wife Kathryn and I trudged after Si Balch, our licensed forester, straight into a spruce thicket next to our house. The going was tough. Much…

“I spent a lot of time earlier in my life being very politically active, testifying, being on boards of non-profits, and ultimately being frustrated and feeling ineffective. I realized that my…

Whenever I spy a pileated woodpecker traversing the sky, I pause to watch its weird undulating flight. The jerky rise-and-drop movement of this large woodpecker is endearingly gawky – like a…

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is gaining new appreciation across North America. A glimpse of a possible future – as seen through panels of spruce and fir. Here in the Northern Forest, we have…

Take a volcanic hotspot at a crossroads of ocean currents, isolate it 600 miles from the nearest landmass, and place it under the equatorial sun. Wait a few million years, allowing seeds and animals…

As we leaned over the Colchester Bog boardwalk, a student asked, “What’s that black stuff on the water?” I suggested gently poking it with a twig. This elicited the expected…

Following the journey that forest products take to - and through - ND Paper's mill in Rumford, Maine. I’ve always been fascinated by pulp and paper mills. There is something mysterious and…

The Water Works wasn’t the only job Charlie was able to obtain. He got the timber contract to cut on Betsey Pratt’s property around Mad River Glen Ski Area. I only met Betsey once. She was…

We recently published an Outside Story describing four evergreen ferns that brave northeastern winters. Here are photos of two of these species, covered up to the tops of their fronds in the snow…