Magazine Series

Last March, I kept company with a red-breasted nuthatch who hunted insects on a dying sugar maple outside the Northern Woodlands office. My second floor window provided a close-up view of the…

In college, I spent a summer building hand-hewn Adirondack lean-tos. The work required both precision and persuasion. We’d chisel perfect saddle notches, which often meant rolling the…

You’re walking alongside a beaver flowage and encounter large mustelid tracks – a bounding pattern along the bank for more than 100 yards. Then the tracks cross the broad frozen…

In 1995, the Vermont legislature created the wildlife conservation license plate. Now, 20 years later, more than $2.5 million has been raised from the sale of these plates; the money goes to…

“Just after the snow melts away but before the growing season starts, the northwoods is vulnerable to wildfire. As a volunteer firefighter, I was assigned to a crew to extinguish…

In the shadows of a February dawn, not far from the town of Greenville, Maine, wildlife biologist Henning Stabins of Plum Creek Timber Company and his colleagues were in search of Lynx…

Michael Low knows intimately every footstep of his 67-acre Green Fire Farm. He has worked this land for a dozen years, and his wife and business partner, Hart Brent, has been here a decade…

Somehow trees put up with all manner of injury and assault during their lives. They have to: they are rooted in place and cannot move to avoid injury. Whether it’s ice- or wind-stripped…

On a warm, sunny day last spring, just a few weeks before the end of the school year, professional timber framer Makaio Maher stood in a small clearing in a stand of red pine trees in Newport,…

Even among the quirky cast of characters we know as birds, the crossbill is a bit of a freak. It’s hard to decide which is more bizarre: its bill or its breeding behavior. Front and…