Magazine Series

The mixed hardwood forest on the edge of the town of Dalton in western Massachusetts looks healthy to the untrained eye, but the researchers from the University of Massachusetts who visited…

A couple years back, a reader gave me a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, which explores the rich duff of British language related to place and seasonal change. It’s a…

On an early spring evening in March 2017, a large crowd packed a public meeting in Ware, Massachusetts, to discuss a controversial proposal to establish a rattlesnake colony at the nearby…

In the summer of 2013, as part of her graduate work at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Jennifer Milikowsky was talking with small-scale landowners in northeastern…

For more than a quarter-century, the dawn and the trees have hardly changed at Bear Swamp. Each June for the past 27 years, which is nearly half my life, I’ve bushwhacked the same route…

Except for the Minnesota black bear that chose to spend the winter hibernating 70 feet up in a bald eagle nest, North American black bears don’t hang out in tree nests. Rather, the…

If you have much to do with firewood, and if you have retained your amateur standing, you will eventually become acquainted with a certain principle – a bitter, rue-laden principle that…

Kakabeka, northwestern Ontario 48°23’45.7” N, 89°37’17.2” W I stand on a stony bluff overlooking a valley filled with the textures and hues of northern forests:…

“Wait, what in the world is that?” In art, as in nature, the familiar attracts us. We feel a certain security in being able to recognize and identify things. We can breathe a sign…

Does your back hurt from bending over to buck firewood on the ground? Can you admit that occasionally you cut too far and run your newly filed chain into the dirt? Do you spend too long…