Magazine Series

After this issue of the magazine goes to print, I’m looking forward to some quiet time outdoors. I suspect many people feel as I do right now – weary of news of any kind, and eager…

A hundred years ago the black cherry tree in the gully behind our house on Cliff Street sprouted in a hillside pasture. It hasn’t moved, but the village has crept up the hill and the…

At some point Great Blue Herons learn to fly. It must be interesting to see them jump off a 50’ perch for the first time. There are no pilot instructors or safety nets below. You just…

Rumbles of thunder have grown distant, and the pea-size raindrops that were slamming my face a short time ago have dwindled to a mist. With the rain easing, I notice trickles of water running…

During mating season, between March and May, mature male wild turkeys, also called toms and gobblers (for the loud, gurgling sound they make), strut in an effort to entice nearby hens into…

Forty minutes before sunrise on a cold April morning, I turn onto a rural road in northwest Rhode Island, get out of my car, and listen for four minutes. I hear distant traffic noise, an…

It is often a fluke, some twist of fate, that changes history. In the case of Dartmouth’s Second College Grant, it was a timber theft that initiated nearly 200 years of logging activity…

Just past dawn in the fourth month of what an exhausted Italian doctor on the BBC pronounced the Plague of Corona, I looked out the kitchen window to see a very large fox standing on a…

With the invasive Emerald Ash Borer expanding its range in New England, ash trees are facing an existential threat. In central Maine, where the Wabanaki tribes have long practiced the art of…

George Washington Sears wrote for Forest & Stream (now Field & Stream) magazine under the pen name Nessmuk, a tribute to his Narragansett Indian childhood mentor who taught him…