Magazine Series

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Since the dawn of history, humans have made great use of leather. They’ve worn it, walked on it, sat on it, wrote on it. Turning animal skin into a durable product requires processing, and…

There is only one place Christina Hazelton, founder of the Upper Valley Reptile Group, likes to see a red-eared slider paddling by an Eastern painted turtle: on the shelf at her…

The Backstory In May 1949, shortly after the end of World War II, Martin Lindauer, a biologist at the University of Munich, happened upon a swarm of bees hanging in a bush outside the Munich…