Magazine Series

“Do not be afraid to go out on a limb…that’s where the fruit is.” Anonymous Here I am, going out on a very long limb, freely admitting that despite living among trees,…

I still remember my childhood excitement when my grandfather explained to me what those holes were in the deep snow. “Snow roosts,” he explained, and they’re made when a…

This image was taken last December from the summit of Mt. Mansfield, Vermont’s highest peak. “The summit had been covered in clouds all morning while I was hiking up.” says…

Castle Freeman wrote here recently [“Easy Wood,” Autumn 2017] about his prolonged tussle with a major limb that had separated from an old butternut tree in his backyard...a job…

Building a second career to follow a very successful first career is a challenge. When those two careers are as different as, say, being an accountant and operating a lumber company, well,…

A predator’s physical senses determine the manner in which it hunts. Wild canids, for instance, favor their sense of smell – you can see this as they trot along the hedgerows,…

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…