The birch bark peelers arrived in a pickup pulling a covered trailer. There was a 4-wheeler in it, a smaller trailer, and sheets of cardboard and stickers for the bark. They unloaded the 4-wheeler and…

This June was an exceptionally wet month in the Northeast, and many of your photos had a water theme. Love was in the air for promethea moths, and sawdust was in the air for a kid taking his first…

Biologists sometimes field questions about a “huge scary bug” that appeared in someone’s home or worse yet on their person. Most turn out to be benign organisms that ended up in the…

The evening was warm, even for August, and the pitcher for the home team Lowell Spinners was having trouble finding the plate. Millions of white mayflies, disoriented by the bright lights of the…

I’m not the type to crave foods, wild or otherwise, but on the hottest days of summer when the cicadas are whirring, I do get a serious hankering for sumac-ade. No wild drink is easier to…

Gone are the days when many in the Northeast relied on pitch pine, and in many cases, gone are the trees themselves. But you can still find this historic tree with the alligator-scale-like bark if you…

When you think of foxes (if you ever do), you likely picture the ginger-coated red fox, like Mr. Tod from Beatrix Potter’s fantastical children’s tales, only without the dapper suitcoat…

What is this (or rather, what will it be)?

I went on vacation this past week down to southern Massachusetts, a place that’s really a different world to a guy from Vermont: the land flat or gently rolling towards the sea; the vegetation…

Tracy Moskovitz and Bambi Jones just can’t seem to stop buying land. It started innocently enough in 1978, “when Bambi went down to the Post Office and talked to the clerk and she came…

While observing the antics of a litter of red fox kits, I witnessed an encounter between the kits’ mother and a very large raccoon. The vixen started barking incessantly when she saw the…

I’m out hunting an unlikely target: mosquitoes. At each stop along the road, I pull on a bug net and gaiters, wrestle a cylindrical vacuum and battery pack onto my shoulder, and head to my…

In the late 1980s, while in graduate school, I learned of mysterious mass die-offs (and eventual extinctions) of many frog species worldwide – events that played a big role in guiding me to a…

Readers interested in animal behavior are likely familiar with books such as Mind of the Raven, Geese of Beaver Bog, and Of Wolves and Men (the first two by Bernd Heinrich, the last by Barry Holstun…

Whenever one hears about bees these days, it is almost invariably to the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, that the reference is being made. Indeed, the health of this species is of justifiably…

My walking up here is a form of yoga practice, I suppose – call it the practice of being perfectly content. I’m descending today, down a steeply sloping ridge on the eastern-most edge of…

Helicopters. Keys. Whirligigs. Samaras. Whatever you call the winged seeds released by maple trees, here’s one more word for them: delicious. Like many New Englanders, I have fond childhood…

The view from atop the great Mayan pyramids of Tikal, in Guatemala’s Petén region, reveals something that is increasingly difficult to find in the tropics these days: unbroken natural…

A while back I had a few hives of honey bees parked at a beef farm down the road, tucked up against a stone wall just outside a pasture. One day the owner called to say that my bees had invaded a…

I’ve been trying to line things up to build a house for a few years now, and am getting nowhere fast. I’ve made some recent progress milling hardwood, though, that I’ll someday turn…