Anyone who’s made his or her way up a mountain is familiar with the sometimes startling transformation of the landscape, from leafy hardwood stands to thick and prickly green cathedrals of red…

Blackbirds do it. Chickadees do it. Even educated emus do it. Some birds are cheaters. Their trysts, dalliances, one-morning stands, and other infidelities would constitute a racy script for a…

Many of us are familiar with Rebecca Merrilees’ work from the indispensable field guide Trees of North America, which she illustrated 34 years ago. It is probably on all of our bookshelves,…

If you are peering into one of those GPS devices many people now find indispensable, everything, anywhere, is shown in relation to your own location. With GPS, you’re always at the center of…

The Northeast has become a hive of ecological counter-intuition, at least by the framework of any living memory. According to Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife…

Saving the New England Cottontail Maine's Pre-settlement Forest Alpine Wildflowers: Life at the Top Growing Trees from Seed Forest Forensics, Cooking with Cattails, The Ways of the Woodchuck, and…

We all see our forests for the trees, but the woods are alive with other plants. Among the most common are ferns, which don’t just get by in the deep shade of the forest – they flourish.…

This flower was recently spotted emerging near our office. What is it?

Managing marginal timberland has always been a challenge, which is why forest landowners are such strong advocates for healthy low-grade wood markets. Good timber is valuable – always has been…

Authors and publishers of field guides, take note: the bar has gone up with A Field Guide to the Ants of New England. Ants? Ants. Lilliputian ants whose entire colony is enclosed in an acorn, ants…

In the natural world predation is relentless, and evading predators strongly favors the evolution of camouflage colors in animals. How contradictory then, for small, defenseless creatures –…

Pick your favorite sign of spring: squirrels mating, mud oozing, maples flowering. Mine is a vulture soaring. Change in the air is a naked, ruddy head gliding in on big wings. But more than being a…

One of my hobbies this time of year is to try to pinpoint the day that I can say that the leaves are out and spring has arrived. Usually it’s sometime in the second week of May, though it seems…

Dinosaur tooth? Probably not, but love the hot pink. What is this?

The word senescence, a fancy term that biologists use to refer to the process of growing old, has recently entered my vocabulary, and judging by the steady rate at which my nose hair has accumulated…

The old saw about “an apple a day” as the way to perfect health may have been overstated, but the apple is a great food and a nutritional bonanza. A medium-sized apple has anywhere from…

The widespread decline of both wild and managed bee populations has raised alarms for more than a decade due to the importance of bees as pollinators of both agricultural crops and wild plants.…

Inventories often report that forested lands across the U.S. and elsewhere are declining, but those studies simply look at the total deforested area. A new analysis of forests in the lower 48 found…

When a stand of trees is blown down in a storm, the typical practice is to salvage as many saleable trees as possible. But a 20- year study in the Harvard Forest found that if you are just…

Spring is on our doorstep, and so are the ants. Seeking the open sugar bowl or the drops of maple syrup left on the kitchen counter, they’re a sure sign that winter has finally drifted away.…