Does Sugaring with a Vacuum Pump Hurt the Trees? Sap flows out of tap holes in sugar maples when the spring days are warm and the nights are freezing, because those conditions make the pressure on the…

Brook trout are often cited as “indicator species” of stream health. They require clean, cold water, so finding them in abundance means you have an especially healthy stream. A healthy…

Finding the kill site was easy. A few days earlier, on the first morning of rifle season, a pair of nearby shots had cracked the frosty quiet of sunrise. I was curious whether the hunter had been…

Even the first lamb had needed help, but delivering the second one required the expertise of someone with much more shepherding experience than me. Instead, on the coldest night we’ve ever had…

I’ve had an attraction to forests for a long time. It’s right there in my high school yearbook: “I will be studying forestry at ….” After college, I thought I would end…

Steve Hagenbuch looked up from a thicket of glossy-leaved shrubs and said, “Given the buckthorn problem here, I think single-tree selection might be the best approach. Group selection will let…

Garlic mustard is trouble. Unlike many other invasive plants, it doesn’t stop at the forest edge. It thrives in partial shade and so has no trouble growing in forest understories. It can grow…

In my youth, I was an avid fisherman who listened to heavy metal music. But today’s anglers catch heavy metal on a hook while singing the blues, because many of the fish commonly taken for sport…

Autumn is closing fast. We toss wood on the fire, button up the house, adjust to lengthening hours of darkness, and believe wild things are going about their own preparatory tasks. My lawns and fields…

The beaver floated with its head sticking up out of the water and just stared at me. In the early twilight, the beaver’s constant presence was menacing. It clearly wanted the pool to itself and…

You don’t have to peer too far into the pages of history to find accounts of severe flooding in Vermont and New Hampshire. The Great Flood of 1927 tops Vermont’s all-time list while the…

Imagine a day in late autumn. The landscape is painted in a palette of grays and browns. You’ve watched the geese fly south. You know that bears, bats, and woodchucks will soon hibernate. But…

In much of New Hampshire and Vermont, our beloved maples are showing signs of distress. Sure, the reds and oranges for which our forests are famous are now popping out of autumn hillsides. Everything…

A rainy day for a snail is equivalent to a beautiful day at the beach for us, which might just explain why our moisture-loving land snails were out and about in greater numbers this summer. Still,…

Birds wheel through the air en masse, swooping and diving as a flock but never hitting one another. It’s not because they have magical powers, although that was one suggestion made in the…

How do we count the days? By bracketing them with night. We rise with the dawn and remain active into the evening, confident that when awakened by sunlight, the “next” day will be distinct…

In the twilight of an overcast mid-August dusk, members of the Hartland Nature Club in Hartland, Vermont, gathered by the side of a trim white farmhouse. At 7:28 pm, a small, dark animal dropped from…

Rory Moon can’t wait to climb through the culvert. His father, David Moon, says he can’t just yet. There are measurements to take first. “We have a serious outlet perch, dude,”…

Did you know there is a silk moth – one of the moths of the family Saturniidae – that belongs exclusively to Northern New England? Its natural range is entirely within Vermont, New…

If you are following a compass course through the woods, one sight that can sink your spirits in a hurry is an expanse of common juniper directly ahead. Juniper patches are not as painful to navigate…