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Magazine Series

From the Center

The shock of crimson from a red maple growing at the edge of a wetland, the spying of a kettle of broadwings flying south, the evocative sound of a katydid suggesting that a return to school…

A Fiery Farewell

In Teale's 1956 book Autumn Across America he refused to see leaf fall as a sad occasion, but bear in mind that he wrote this book as he was travelling across the country, not standing at…

Tamarack

In the fall of the year, in almost any rural locale in the northeast, you are likely to hear an apocryphal tale about the unschooled recent arrival from down-country and his tamaracks. The…

Long Beards and Short Tales: Our Lumbering Language

What do loggers and moneylenders have in common? When is a lumberer a lumberjack? And what the heck is a lumber room? The answers to these questions are intertangled and ancient, and can be…

The Weeks Act and the Next Century of Conservation in New England

A century ago, northern New England was a mess. Its forests were cut over and burned out, and the remaining stands were a mere remnant of the wooded expanse that once sheltered native peoples…

The Thunderstorm Mill: Making Lumber the Old-Fashioned Way

Water power. Our ancestors, those stalwart souls who headed off into the wilderness to build new settlements, depended on it. They dammed streams and rivers to power the mills that were…

Tricks of the Trade: Understanding Low-Kickback Saw Chain

Some chainsaw chains are designed to minimize the reactive force known as kickback. These chains are found on a wide range of chainsaws made for homeowners, arborists, and loggers and are…

An Ode to Warblers

Color, music, grace, and flight mingle in the lives of most birds. But no bird, at least here in the Northeast, pulls it off like a warbler. Warblers are in a family called Parulidae, known…

The Overstory

Black cherry, Prunus serotina Black cherry grows in many different situations: among white pine on abandoned farmland, with red maple on poor sites, and scattered among northern hardwoods in…

Fifty Years of Maine Stumpage Prices: Trends, Surprises, and Lessons

Anyone who reads the papers knows how badly the prices of stocks, houses, and mutual funds have done since the market peaks of a few years ago. If you don’t sell stumpage very often, you may…