Along with the crisp mornings and crimson colors that signal summer’s slide into fall, there are changes occurring in the forests that go mostly unnoticed.  Among them is the dispersal of…

A flashback to when we had leaves. What is climbing this tree?

Many of your October photos captured quiet scenes: vivid fall color, early snows and sunset views. Meanwhile, the animal world seemed to enjoy the last few days of warmth, and prepared for the lean…

Consider the givens in life, those moments of predictability that stand out in a constantly changing world. The sun rises in the east, for instance. The sky is blue. Or how about this one: while in…

For portions of two days, I watched a red squirrel clipping and caching cones from the crown of a towering white spruce. It was a bumper crop that season, and thousands of cones hung in bunches…

When you stumble across something purple in the forest, it’s hard not to stop in your tracks. At least it was for me on a recent hike in Thetford, when I came across three purple mushrooms. They…

As an avid birdwatcher for more than 30 years, I’ve long been familiar with the big picture of songbird migration. Tiny blackpoll warblers, for instance, fly 1,500 miles from southern New…

Rich Root sent us this shot of a mystery insect he spotted on a spruce in a woodlot in Weston, Vermont, in late October. “It was dead when I found it,” he said.

By now, hunters around the Northeast are counting the days until (deer hunting) rifle season. In the spirit of the season, we thought we’d share this series of pictures that we took on the…

We’re still recovering from our big annual Writers & Readers Conference, while also putting the final touches on the winter issue of the magazine. So this week, in lieu of an editor’s…

In the early morning of October 8, 2014, an autumn thunderstorm unleashed winds of more than 100 miles per hour as it crossed the western slopes of Mount Tom, a familiar landmark in the Connecticut…

Elizabeth had been the one person whose opinion, other than Patchett’s own, Patchett had the slightest regard for. On those occasions when Kinneson needed to get his hired man into gear,…

Harry Potter rode one during the Quidditch matches at Hogwarts. The Wicked Witch of the West zipped around on one in the Wizard of Oz. We’re talking, of course, about witch’s brooms. No…

It came from the lake. It is a life form nearly as old as life itself. Living peacefully in the depths for eons, it is awakened by humankind’s abuse of the environment. It strikes out with…

Who’s munching on this milkweed?

A couple weeks back our friend Mike Batten, a logger who lives down the road from our office, dropped off a century-old journal he thought we might find interesting. It was kept by Ernest Magoon, a…

Your photos showed baby snapping turtles emerging from the mud, a heron snacking on a huge fish, and one very tired looking daddy cardinal. Maples began to turn, kids frolicked on the rocks, and those…

Forest soils certainly benefit from the addition of plant nutrients. Elements like nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and magnesium are the building blocks of leaves, twigs, trunks, and roots,…

On a warm August evening at Boston’s Fenway Park, everything had fallen into place by the fifth inning: The Red Sox were beating the Angels 6-0. My pals and I in right field were enjoying two of…

We call them shooting stars, and they never fail to make us catch our breath in surprise and wonder. But they’re not stars at all. Those bright, brief streaks across the night sky are meteors.…