Trees grow where they can. And they are surpassingly capable, making do in an impressive array of conditions around the globe, including many harsh places. But there are limits to their versatility.…

Didymo in a river looks like many gross things: trailing wisps of toilet paper, goopy brown blobs, a coating of slime. It’s commonly referred to as “rock snot” and for good reason.…

When I was a boy of about eight, I used to hunt deer out of a little 12x16 camp that sat up in a bowl on the top of Shatterack Mountain in Rupert, Vermont. My father and Junior Harwood had gone in…

A woolly bear hunches along a rock wall, stops, raises its head and starts off in a new direction. Now that it’s late summer, this rusty-brown and black larva of the Isabella tiger moth is…

There’s that moment, when you’re riding on a Ferris wheel, when the gondola you’re riding in pauses at the circle’s highest point. The engine stops and you just dangle there.…

What’s in a name? With Northern Woodlands as the flagship program of an organization officially named the Center for Woodlands Education, there has been some confusion over the different names.…

On a remote mountaintop in the Dominican Republic, a group of biologists crouched in the undergrowth and played pre-recorded bird calls. In the dim light came a reply: Pweer….. pweer…..…

Dragonflies are nature’s aeronautical marvels.  Whether darting over water at 35 miles per hour or hovering in midair, they are a spectacle of colors in motion—from a delicate…

During summer trips to visit family, from home in Vermont to Connecticut, and then from home to Maine and back, I’ve been checking out a lot of roadside plants. That is to say, a lot of chicory,…

Butternut country is so distinctive that Parker Nichols knows he has arrived even before he sees the first butternut tree. As the proprietor of Vermont WildWoods, a flooring and millwork company in…

Last Saturday, I went down to Woodstock for the 10th anniversary celebration of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historic Park. The event was also the unveiling of their new Forest Center, a…

The apple blossoms this past spring were the first hint of an unusual season – they were abundant and lovely. The crab nearest our house set fruit for the first time in a decade. Then I noticed…

We rented a hydraulic splitter last week for processing firewood. It was the first time I’d ever used one. The task at hand was a nearly two-century-old, field-grown sugar maple that had toppled…

The yellow warbler is a tiny explosion of color, music and tenacity. Every spring these songbirds arrive from the tropics to our alder swamps, willow stands and wet thickets. The male glows neon…

    An earwig still evokes a shudder after many centuries, for the insect’s Old English name, earwicga (”ear” and “worm”), suggests it might crawl into your ear…

In the 1958 film, “The Blob,” a huge amoeba-like creature from outer space engulfs and kills several people in a small Pennsylvania town before it is eventually destroyed by a local…

If the man in the film who explained, “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” turned his attention to you, and you ended up one centimeter tall and found yourself on the lawn, you would have your work…

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Several decades ago, after long hours of work in the carrels of Dartmouth’s Baker Library, I would make time for a walk around the library’s illuminated clock tower to view the aerial…

Hi! My name’s Dave Mance III. I’m the new Managing Editor at Northern Woodlands magazine, which is to say that I’m the new Anne Margolis (except not quite as organized and, well, a…