In April, the Maine Land Use Regulation Commission (LURC) received a petition that could change the nature of development in the backwoods of Maine. The proposal from the Plum Creek Timber Company, a…

With the recent arrival of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in New York state, officials from agriculture and fish and game departments throughout the Northeast have been scrambling to stop its spread.…

Foresters of a certain age will recognize the question, “Forests for whom and for what?” posed by Marion Clawson in the title of a forest policy book widely read by students learning how…

“This time they got caught” was the distinct overtone in a recent news story in which 15 illegal immigrants from China who had packed themselves into a crate were found just in the nick of…

Unfolding over the past year, we’ve experienced something at Northern Woodlands that serves as a symbol for everything that we’ve stood for since we began publishing this magazine 11 years…

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…

It is usually easiest to fell a tree in the direction that it’s leaning, but sometimes it’s necessary to fell it in the opposite direction. A tree leaning away from the intended direction…

This is not the book for you if you want the standard wildlife habitat fare: what kind of viburnum to plant at the edge of your yard, how to make a brush pile for chipmunks and sparrows, or how to set…

In the past decade or so, vernal pools have received a fair amount of attention from people other than naturalists, ecologists, conservationists, and natural resource professionals. An increasing…

This is a powerful book. It is relatively short as well, and if you are lucky enough to be able to read it over the space of a few days, it will work on your psyche the way a really good poem works.…

We humans have a knack for believing that everything was better, more vivid, more extreme, or at least more memorable when we were younger. The snow was deeper. The foliage was more beautiful. The…

Take a look at any Connecticut River tributary in August, and you’ll be hard-pressed to remember back to April when melting snow and spring rains filled it to its banks. At Spring levels, it…

I’ll admit it: I was one of those kids who hid behind the couch when the tornado lashed the Kansas prairie in the early scenes of The Wizard of Oz. My parents could only coax me back out into…

Avid summer readers are immersed in thrillers, pot-boilers, and fantasies whose plots swirl around sleuthing and solving mysterious codes. But look beyond the printed page, and you will quickly…

Some people call any wet, mucky place a bog, or maybe a swamp. They hardly ever think to call it a fen. It may well be a fen, of course, unless it’s a marsh. Or possibly a seep. How to sort all…

“Lime, lime, and nothing more makes fathers rich and sons poor.” This adage hearkens back to times when soil fertility was poorly understood; farmers who worked acidic soils discerned that…

Anyone who has spent time hiking or walking in the woods has probably come across a trail that has been deeply eroded to the point of becoming a streambed full of large, unstable rocks. It’s an…

This is the caterpillar summer of our discontent. They seem to be everywhere, eating the leaves off ornamental apple and cherry trees, defoliating black cherry trees in fencelines, and even munching…

There is a crop that most of us spend many hours on in the summer. We don’t eat it, sell it, or put it in vases, but most of us couldn’t image living without it. It is grass! Somewhere…

Crows are a lot like us. Not only do they like to live in the same places we do but also they live as we do. “There is probably no organism on Earth that has a more similar social system to…