Magazine Series

Fifteen years ago, on its centennial anniversary, The National Audubon Society recognized 100 “Champions of Conservation” in the twentieth century. All are individuals who have…

Three tom turkeys vie for the attention of one hen. If puffed out feathers, red wattles, fanned tails and lowered wings don’t win her over, a repertoire of nonvocal “hums”…

Some of the timberland my family owns abuts state forest. On our side of the property line is a thoroughly ordinary mix of beech, red maple, and white pine. Mixed age, but pretty young; the…

Log truckers have nothing to haul if loggers aren’t cutting wood, and the rain this past summer kept loggers out of the woods for weeks at a time. Don Moore, Jr., a log truck operator…

We carefully rolled the big spruce log with our peaveys, and it settled into place with a thunk, fitting almost perfectly over the log beneath it. A little fine tuning with axe and chisel and…

It’s late afternoon, and fine snow is sifting down into Joan and Bill Hildreth’s woods in Montgomery, Vermont. Their property lies within a large expanse of forest on the edge of…

“They had to leave the hollies,” Brian Tefft said, pointing across an opening studded with snow-touched slash to a pair of green-bowered bluebirds. “That was one…

A tree’s growth is based, in part, on competition from its neighbors. Its first priority is to gain access to the sun, and in a forest up is the only way to go. (An open grown tree will…

It is difficult to describe the Theology of Birds to which I am devoted, except to compare it to what Emerson said of his own spiritual condition: “It is always fully felt but ever only…

It is an aster in winter, sun through the clouds – a force of nature called the yellow-rumped warbler. Find its buttery warmth even when life outside seems to groan or crunch or crack…