You’ll find three stories in this issue of Northern Woodlands covering the growing potential for biomass. If these improved prospects for producing more energy and other products from low grade…

It is spring again, and that means that bees are buzzing about. Recently, two studies of bees have attempted to answer two basic questions – how honeybees fly and how bumblebees learn. How…

In our 12 years of publishing, we’ve put together nearly 250 stories; in my admittedly biased opinion, all of those have been read by too few people. Within that lament we recognized an…

Cutting with a dull chain will increase wear on both you and your saw and increase the risk of kickback. How do you know when a chain is dull? A saw with a dull chain doesn’t pull itself into…

Last year, the headlines read, “Ivory-billed Woodpecker Found in Arkansas.” Scientists smiled and birders cheered. The largest woodpecker in North America, thought to be extinct for over…

During late summer and early autumn, raccoons in Vermont and New Hampshire witness something of a miracle: food falls from the sky. This is not their traditional fare of plants and invertebrates but…

If you find yourself gazing out the window in winter wishing the hustle and bustle of yardwork could be spread more evenly across the year, don’t despair. There is something you can do right…

After the leaves of sumac have fallen, the large, inverted cones of tiny red fruits that poke up from the tops of their wide crowns give the trees a top-heavy look – a look that is even more…

This has certainly been a normal winter so far here in Vermont and New Hampshire – normal in that there’s no such thing as normal. Temperatures have been above average, and snow depth has…

Birders who have been keeping a tally of their feeder visitors over the past half-century may have noticed an unusual trend: some species that once strictly summered here, including tufted titmice,…

“Ice happens,” says Rod Wentworth, a fisheries scientist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. For the animals that live in our area’s streams, the big question is where…

Have you ever been walking through the woods on a snowy afternoon and seen a bit of green poking up through the snow? Seeing the green fronds of a fern at this time of year may seem like an uncommon…

My father, who notices these things, once noticed that the newspapers seemed to be misprinting the times of sunrise and sunset in December. They said the sun wouldn’t start rising earlier until…

In mid-winter of 725 A.D., a 52-year-old cleric named Boniface chopped down the great Donar oak in the German territory of Hesse, thus depriving the Hessians of their traditional symbol of the Norse…

When it comes to nature, we tend to stuff things we don’t know into pigeonholes that are already defined by the familiar. If someone tells me their cat has left a “present” of a dead…

So you think you’re a Sagittarius, right? Or an Aquarius? Well, think again. According to the horoscopes, I’m supposed to be a Virgo. Yet there’s absolutely no doubt that I’m a…

The winter coats are out, as are the hats, scarves, and mittens. We humans are hoping for lots of sunny days this winter to help keep our spirits lifted through the darkest days of the calendar. All…

While Romania is clearly not a part of the territory we normally cover, we believe that the writer’s observations in this article are relevant to the ongoing debate about the role that large…

Any tree is better off without having holes drilled into its stem. Depending on their size and placement, stem holes can cause all kinds of problems for trees, from interrupting the flow of water,…

Of all the land conservation projects in the Northern Forest over the past two decades, the most hopeful might be the Downeast Lakes Forestry Partnership, which was concluded this past summer on…