The whir of drills and the tap of hammers will soon be resonating from sugarbushes. Clouds of roiling steam and the first waft of fresh syrup won’t be far behind. As the 2008 season kicks off,…

Quick – what hardiness zone are you in? If you happen to be a farmer or gardener, you’ll know the answer right off the bat, and it will probably be “four” if you live in New…

We had been looking for owls since before dawn. Mars, gleaming orange in the east, was visible as we pulled into the deep shadows of a hemlock stand. We played digital snippets of a barred owl…

Last Sunday afternoon, I picked up Castle Freeman’s Go With Me, and started reading it around 4:00. I finished sometime after 9:00, stopping only to throw more wood in the woodstove. I…

Our fickle New England weather often appears in daily discourse. When boasting about having endured one meteorological extreme or another, we sometimes stretch the limits of our credibility. One…

We’ve been developing an article for the upcoming issue about outdoor wood boilers, and the topic has been driving us a bit crazy. On the one hand, many of these boilers are terribly smoky and…

Picture Charlie Browne, executive director of the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, walking along the edge of the Connecticut River on a winter day at first light. Perhaps the snow crunches…

It happened again the other day. I was reading a newspaper article, and the writer used the word “forester” to describe a person who owns forestland.  I’ve also seen forester…

The adage that your enemies know your weaknesses best is especially true in the case of plants and predators that have co-evolved. As the predators evolve new strategies for attack, plants counter…

Perhaps the first thing that can be said about the winter sky is that, relatively speaking, it’s pretty boring. Discounting the occasional sun dog or freak crack of lightning in the heart of a…

A snowshoe hare lives down our tree-shrouded road where the track narrows between dense woods. Also known as the varying hare, the snowshoe hare is cousin to both the smaller southern cottontail…

Wood is a renewable energy resource. It’s local: so local that, for many of us, it’s available just a few steps out the back door. It’s nearly carbon neutral: trees absorb enough…

Winter will officially begin on Saturday, but it is already kicking in around here, making those of us of a certain age reminisce about the snowstorms of yore. I remember winters in Syracuse in the…

In years when winter food is scarce in the boreal forests of Canada, flocks of birds migrate south and irrupt or “burst” into local fields, forests, and feeders. The winter of 2007-2008…

I’m a print guy, but I haven’t always been a print guy. My first involvement with media was nearly 30 years ago, when I learned the nuts and bolts of video production in the late 1970s at…

Of all our native mammals, none seems to elicit more disdain or hostility than the fisher. “Nasty,” “bloodthirsty” and “vicious” are some of the adjectives used to…

Lakes of the Clouds hiking hut sits on the southwestern shoulder of Mt. Washington, in New Hampshire’s Presidential Range. At over 5,000 feet elevation, the hut sits about 250 feet above…

Moosehead Lake is one of Maine’s natural treasures. Ever since Plum Creek, the Moosehead area’s largest landowner, unveiled its long-term plan for its holdings around the lake, arguments…

If you’re in a fishing boat on Lake Champlain, the boundary between New York and Vermont can seem quite blurry, so blurry that fishermen from either state can fish anywhere on the lake with only…

“Nature is a magic show of the highest order,” writes Bernd Heinrich in The Snoring Bird, his very seductive personal narrative. “I can hardly think of a greater grandeur and…