Magazine Series

While the mighty axe rightly receives credit for felling most of the timber of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the peavey that took the work out of moving these logs, on both…

Days, sometimes weeks, before a luna moth hatches from its cocoon, it starts to move within its winter shell. Quiet bursts of rustling accompany the cocoon’s sporadic movements.…

Wood knows no boundaries. Not just wood as forest, which straddles arbitrary political boundaries throughout the globe, but wood as logs and lumber. Since humans first learned to turn trees…

Let’s face it: trees are better off in the woods. Although forest trees – like their more urban counterparts – face many threats to growth and survival, at least in the woods…

Last year, May first was about as nice a spring day as you could ask for. Dawn broke cool, maybe a touch of frost in the cold spots, but the sky was high – just blue jay blue – and…

For all the time we spend watching birds during the breeding season, rarely do we get to see birds actually breeding. That’s because avian copulation usually lasts only seconds. Birds…

When snow drifts linger into late April and freezing rain challenges new blossoms, mother bears and their infant cubs seek out wetland edge habitats. Seepage areas and vernal pools, as well as…

One irony of ancient forests and wilderness areas – known for their absence of human imprint – is that their names conjure up associations with people. In the Sierras, the Mariposa…

After the leaves fall in October, the mountains that rise toward the Canadian border north of Jackman, Maine, begin to wear their maple like a fuzzy, gray wool blanket. Sugar and red maple are…

In Fairlee, Vermont, there’s a 540-acre stretch of former glacier called Lake Morey. If a loon on that lake pointed his bill northwest, flew straight as the idiomatic crow, and kept…