Evolution among tree and bug species is something of a cat-and-mouse spy game: One side discovers a strategy that earns it the upper hand, at least temporarily, then the other side counters with…

We’re all familiar with the impossibly loud blasts emitted by tiny spring peepers in March. But have you noticed that peepers peep again in early October, not from ponds, but from the woods? In…

Since only a very few trees grow absolutely vertically, determining and adjusting for the lean of a tree is an important skill for any sawyer preparing to fell a tree. For the sake of discussion,…

In the fullness of summer and in the depths of winter, chokecherry is not particularly noticeable. By early June, it has all but disappeared as part of the anonymous expanse of greenness that edges…

For the past six months they flickered among us—tiny flashes of red, orange, yellow and blue floating above hayfields and dancing in flower gardens: spring azures, great spangled fritillaries,…

Adrenalin is a beautiful thing. At Northern Woodlands, we are quite accustomed to the rhythms of a quarterly cycle. Four publications a year works just fine. Develop the stories, sell the ads, work…

The Timber-Frame Home By Tedd Benson Taunton Press, 1997 Timber framing has become very popular the Northeast in the past 35 years as people have rediscovered the beauty and history of this…

Let me start with a story. Several years ago, a logger showed me the harvesting he was doing on a piece of his family’s property. This was the third time he had harvested this particular piece,…

It’s easy to assume plants just sit there and do little, while animals run around busying themselves. Not the case: Plants often are on the move, or at least their seeds are. A plant…

My friend J was lucky enough to draw a Vermont moose tag last year; luckier still to take a strange-looking-but-in-a-good-way bull on the fourth day of the season. The bull was 10.5 years old, as…

Have you ever wondered what your property looks like from above? Or how it fits in with your neighbors’ properties? Topographic maps and property surveys can give you an abstract understanding…

On a remote mountaintop in the Dominican Republic just before Christmas, a group of Vermont biologists crouched in the undergrowth and played recorded bird calls hoping for an early holiday present.…

It’s cheap, it’s plastic, but for half a century, the little 21-drawer storage chest has been serving its purpose. It and everything in it could very well have been tossed long ago, but I…

Thomas Deininger is an artist, an environmentalist, and an iconoclast. His large assemblages often fracture traditional artistic premises in an overt and seductive manner. By using decidedly…

Once the world discovers you know something about nature, the questions never end.  Odd phone calls come from people you’ve never met asking about the identity of this or that plant or…

The prices reported here are those that log buyers—mostly sawmills and wholesalers—are paying for logs. Because these are prices paid for delivered wood, landowners need to adjust the…

When temperatures linger around 60 degrees, most people reach for light jackets or flannel shirts; conversely, when the mercury hits 80, we don shorts and short sleeves. Seventy degrees? Well…

Bim … bim … bam.  This late-summer sound announces that our oak tree produced acorns this year and is dropping them onto the metal roof of our shed. Along our road in Thetford,…

We’ve received all sorts of feedback on Dave Mance’s story on hunting camps in the Autumn issue. One wrote that “I wanted the hunting camp article to go on and on.” Going to…

Somewhere in a marsh in northern Ohio stands an 85-foot-tall American chestnut tree. The existence of this tree, one of only a handful of its kind to survive chestnut blight, remained a secret until…