What’s so special about this maple log?

There’s probably no better example of a love/hate relationship than the one between the forest landowner and her deer. (At least from a human perspective – deer seem to regard us with a…

My favorite season tends to be whatever comes next, which means, for now, deep winter. With our storm windows installed and four tons of wood pellets put up, I'm feeling smug as the ant in…

Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! vile thing, let loose, Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent! -William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream The aroma of wood smoke lingers as you take…

The roar of a chainsaw breaks the stillness of the cold winter morning. I wade through knee-deep snow to retrieve a newly fallen balsam fir. With sappy gloves, I drag the fir pole to a fresh bundle of…

This picture was taken by board member Richard Carbonetti. Yup, it was taken in the woods. What is it?

There are three weekends of rifle season in Vermont, and as such the season unfolds in acts, like a play. We opened the first act on Friday night, the boys arriving in camp at various times…

In November, as the last colors of autumn are fading, the stark outlines of tree branches are revealed. During this time you might be lucky enough to see an occasional dark mass, looking from a…

Thomas Crotty, a Massachusetts native, moved to Maine in 1964, drawn by the power and beauty of its coastal landscape. At the solo retrospective of his work at the Portland Museum of Art, then…

Of all the silvicultural techniques available to forest owners, perhaps no method is more underused than coppicing. Coppicing is a reproduction method where a tree is cut back periodically to…

I know many of you reading this don’t hunt. But even so, I’ll bet you’ve heard the one where the hunter bags his first buck. How the opportunity came as a surprise after he’d…

A postcard arrived in the mail last week, encouraging me to “clean up” or “sell out” my woodlot. There were people in my area waiting to assist me! I should act now, before my…

When the hemlock wooly adelgid, an invasive pest that sucks the life out of eastern hemlock trees, made its appearance in New England forests in the 1970s and 80s, many forestry experts expected it…

Trees capture sunlight to produce chemical energy, and they may soon be teaming up with the sun to produce electricity, as well. A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue…

Riki Moss looks into the forest and imagines another world; a world filled with spirits and ambiguous life forms. For years, she has been engaged with her ever-growing, ever-shifting installment…

Nature writers spend a lot of time celebrating the unknowns in the natural world, those little reminders that we’re not as smart as we think we are. It’s an especially resonant message if…

Reader Penny Harris took this picture in her woods in Cambridge, Vermont. What's the black growth?

One of the hardest parts of writing, or any creative endeavor, is knowing when to crinkle up the paper and start over again. The novelist William Faulkner called this killing your darling. Country…

He stretched his massive neck, closed his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, eyes, and antlers back and forth across the spruce’s overhanging branch tips. Periodically, he would stop, open his eyes,…

If your pulse jolts hearing the rusty cackle of a turkey; if a fly made of “mallard quill thorax ribbed in gold wire ahead of a roughened white hare drubbing, no wing” is your holy grail;…