Oftentimes the first question a young child asks upon entering a natural history museum and seeing the stuffed specimens is: “Are these real?” Barn Owl with Rust #2 begs the same…

First, a few clarifications. This trip took place neither in Switzerland nor in a Swiss canoe. What made it Swiss was the presence here in Maine of our Swiss relatives, Vreni and Ueli. Before they…

Your modern chainsaw has a precision engine that can be rendered into a worthless chunk of aluminum with just a few careless mistakes, like running straight gas through it, or spending an afternoon…

Exotic invasive plants get the headlines, as they crowd out native species, deprive wildlife of food, and generally devalue the Northern Forest. But in certain cases, native plants can cause the same…

A decade or so ago, a friend showed me his copy of a book called Make a Chair from a Tree. Now who could possibly resist a title like that? With its step-by-step procedures for making a ladderback…

Dawn, in early November: stepping outside, I hear a twittering from on high. Against the brightening sky, I glimpse a small bird with a rounded head and a long, pointed bill. On rapidly beating wings,…

In the basement of the New Hampshire Fish and Game department’s Concord office, down an industrial gray set of stairs, and through a hallway that smells like an elementary school library, a…

Michael Dirr, my favorite horticulturalist, is a man of strongly held views. Though our tastes don’t always align (one of my favorite plants, Kolkwitzia, “gives him a headache”), we…

Certainly there’s much to admire about paper birch trees, also known as white birch (Betula papyrifera). Ecologists marvel about how adaptable they are, growing natively over a transcontinental…

Balsam woolly adelgids (BWA) were first noticed in this country in Brunswick, Maine, in 1908. Like the dreaded hemlock woolly adelgid, this tiny, wingless, introduced insect feeds by inserting its…

They are the epitome of avian energy, hovering, darting, and flowing like no other birds, almost as if they weren’t birds at all but rather androids or creatures borne from the sparks of our…

Harvard Forest recently produced a report called Wildlands and Woodlands, A Vision for the New England Landscape. The vision calls for a long-term conservation effort that would conserve 70 percent of…

Members of the board of directors and the staff of The Center for Northern Woodlands Education met in western Massachusetts this July for a planning retreat focused on change. We discussed ways to…

Biomass Debate Heats Up Native Invasives on Your Woodlot Habitat for Woodcock Making a Windsor Chair Why Paper Birch is White Poisonous Mushrooms, and much more

Flyfishing from a canoe in a small headwater pond at the tippity-top of the Connecticut River is usually a quiet experience. That’s why the sudden splash caused me to turn my head just in time…

Like a forest fire that appears to be contained before exploding into an inferno, biomass has gone from being a topic of interest primarily to foresters and energy experts to one that can draw…

It’s late afternoon on a dog day of summer, and you’ve just finished a joyful canoe ride along the banks of a big pond shaded by hills and trees. Now it’s time to pull the Old Town…

You'll need to tell us what it is to win, but feel free to also include your Rorschachian interpretations.

At this time of year, honeybees fly in and out of their hive in such numbers that on a sunny day there’s danger of a log jam at the entrance, as some bees scramble to get out to forage and…

Darting through the air while twittering in constant conversation, chimney swifts are a cheering presence over many cities and towns. True to their name, which comes from the Old English swifan…