Trees speak many languages, their leaves whooshing in summer and trunks creaking in winter. At the onset of spring, trees become sounding boards for courtship. Before the thrushes and warblers and…

Gutter pipes full of soggy peat show up on the bench by my office each March.  This means one thing: my colleague Peter Hope’s Saint Michael’s College students are about to experience…

Imagine ten nearly round white eggs snug in a hollow tree, lined with soft feathers plucked from the mother’s breast. The hen carefully tends the two-inch eggs for about a month until the chicks…

In their early days, game cameras were marketed mostly to hunters looking to get a leg up in understanding the population of specific game species in their favorite (or secret) hunting areas.…

A two-part question: What type of cones are these, and why are they in a pile?

So the crazy weather continues, though of late it’s been too cold instead of too hot. By putting the temperatures from the last two weeks side by side with the temperatures from the previous two…

It was probably 105 degrees in the shade – a typical July afternoon in southwestern Oklahoma. I crept closer to the rocky outcrop where I suspected the bobcat was trying to hide from the heat.…

For many of us, winter in the Northeast means cold temperatures and piles of snow, drifting through forests and across fields. It’s hard to imagine that winter here could be different, but the…

The first time I saw the fox last February, I did a double take. It was late morning when I glanced out the window on my way from one task to the next. The unexpected flash of red made me stop and…

Sheila Bourque remembers well exactly when it all started. It was about five years ago. She had climbed Hacker’s Hill in the Maine town of Casco and arrived at the top to find a celebration in…

This tree has a disease. What’s your diagnosis?

“We know that getting hit is part of the sport.” -Boxer Frank Buglioni Thirty-two degrees is a magic number in sugaring because without it sap doesn’t flow. A freeze at night and…

Your February photos revealed a deer escaping a coyote by water, a skidder escaping water by logs, and a glimpse of an intriguing new winter pastime: forest goat sledding.  Check out the lynx…

In an earlier era, before children, my husband and I would sometimes host workshops on our woodlot. One group in particular enjoyed using our property because, they enthused, we had such a diverse…

An injured barred owl sat in the back seat of a four-door sedan, staring balefully out the window at its rescuer. “I saw him on the side of the road, just sitting there, trying to fly,”…

Without making a partisan political statement, I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. Consider cooking. Thanks to the proliferation of…

In 1979, Laura and Guy Waterman came out with the acclaimed Backwoods Ethics, a book that advocated low-impact hiking, camping, and alpine management. This is a rerelease of that book with a new…

My wife and I spent a summer 25 years ago living with a crow. A veterinarian acquaintance had been given a fledgling that had fallen out of a nest, and through a series of handoffs the bird came to…

Driving to town on a winter day, I occasionally see flocks of white birds where the wind sweeps across fields, blowing snow across the road and exposing the grass. Rising and falling, the birds look…

What is spilling out of this log? (Thanks to Bonnie Pease for the photo.)