Magazine Series

Sitting on the passenger’s side floor of my pickup are three broken axes/mauls, all succumbed to the same fate by excited friends and neighbors who had “wooded” and snapped…

The moon not yet up, we forage in near darkness, out back in the woods, the wet spot to the north, where they grow in clumps, bunched like fists, and push their first wound heads through earth…

As our forests awaken from a long winter, some plants green-up sooner than others. While many of our native trees and plants remain dormant, the young leaves of woody non-native invasive…

From the first harsh (but oh-so-welcome) kong-ga-ree of a red-winged blackbird as early as late February, to the complex and voluptuous harmonic of a wood thrush in mid-May, our northern…

It’s a hot, humid August morning in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, the kind that usually yields thunder and lightning by day’s end. But at nearby Buck Lake – just 700 feet higher in…

Mainly nocturnal and amazingly well camouflaged, eastern screech-owls can be very difficult to spot. Weighing a mere 4 to 8 ounces, these short, stocky owls often roost in tree cavities.…

At the small-town middle school I attended, all students were required to take woodshop and home economics in 4th grade. I didn’t really take to sewing, but working with wood and…

In my home state of Vermont, annual Town Meeting Day takes place at the chilly edge of spring. Vermonters rightly take pride in the usual civility of these events. That said, early March can…

Leonardo da Vinci perfected the painting technique known as “Sfumato” – from the Italian sfumare, “to evaporate like smoke” – in the 16th century. This…

Years ago, I spent considerable time investigating factors that affected the distribution and abundance of snowshoe hares. That investigation was part of a larger project examining what…