Silent Spring – the book that forever changed the way the world looks at chemicals – turns 50 this year, and when you’re a writer researching the herbicide glyphosate for a story…

Most of us have been at least annoyed, if not infuriated, by porcupines from time to time. Their desperate need for salt in the summer months gets them in big trouble around the house. They spend the…

I grew up near the water in Brunswick, Maine, where warm mornings are often shrouded in a thick deck of clouds. On the coastal plain, moist south winds cool as they pass over the chilly waters of the…

February 13 – Day 1 It’s hard to decide when the first official day of sugaring season is. Maybe it’s in November, when you walk your sugarwoods and inventory the line damage, cut…

When I was five, my father purchased the axe that accompanied us through the adventures that defined my boyhood. It was a Hudson Bay camp axe from Snow & Nealley, made in the classic style with a…

The Lowdown on Glyphosate, Ghost Moose and Winter Ticks, Clouds Up Close, Crop Tree Release, Bird Fallouts, Naval Timbers, A Corpse’s Foot, and much more

To tell you where this nest was found would give away the answer. So, without knowing this nest’s place of origin, do you know which bird built it?

Ah, to be in the woods on a winter bluebird day. Crisp, clear, and cold, with an unimpeded view to the cloudless sky above. The sun has lifted itself out of the December doldrums and it now warms your…

Photographer Zack Clothier used a method called “stacking” to capture this image of the night sky over Coon Pond in the Adirondacks. Twelve images, all taken from a tripod in the same…

The herring gull, one of our most cosmopolitan bird species, thrives in picnic areas or parking lots, at farms or fast-food joints, at sea or in sewage lagoons. The ivory gull, the embodiment of…

“What do you think, Chuck, oak or beech?” This was my forester asking, and my immediate response was not to say anything because I was gasping for air after pursuing him up a rocky…

This winding vine, bedecked with puffballs of silky filaments, was found throughout a roadside thicket. What is it?

From the trees he harvests, Mark Fenwick sculpts his dreams. At the end of his dirt drive in Guilford, Vermont, a dancing bear, larger than life, poses on one paw, beguiling passersby. Beyond it, an…

There’s not much I’d rather do during my treasured weekend hours than make my way through some stretch of woods, just to see what I can see. In the green and humid glory of a New England…

One frosty winter’s day, while tracking a mink along the edge of a stream, I discovered some tiny winter stoneflies creeping on top of the snow. Unaccountably, the stream-dwelling larvae of…

A new forestry has taken hold across the northeast. Many forest owners want to take a more ecological approach to managing their woods, and they feel right at home with a more natural forestry…

A New England January would be hard to bear without that winter essential: the puffy down jacket. It’s a great accessory for leisurely walks, but when we exert ourselves and speed up the pace, a…

Those reddish spruce needles you see adorning some mountaintop spruce trees are dead, killed by freezing. They are a flagrant indication that the host tree could not stand the weather. Such…

What are these gnarled formations on this birch branch?

Move your hand to your groin area and trace your inner thigh to where your leg becomes torso. You’ll feel a cord-like muscle there that seems to attach your upper and lower regions together.…