Magazine Series

Dawn, in early November: stepping outside, I hear a twittering from on high. Against the brightening sky, I glimpse a small bird with a rounded head and a long, pointed bill. On rapidly…

In the basement of the New Hampshire Fish and Game department’s Concord office, down an industrial gray set of stairs, and through a hallway that smells like an elementary school…

Michael Dirr, my favorite horticulturalist, is a man of strongly held views. Though our tastes don’t always align (one of my favorite plants, Kolkwitzia, “gives him a…

Certainly there’s much to admire about paper birch trees, also known as white birch (Betula papyrifera). Ecologists marvel about how adaptable they are, growing natively over a…

Balsam woolly adelgids (BWA) were first noticed in this country in Brunswick, Maine, in 1908. Like the dreaded hemlock woolly adelgid, this tiny, wingless, introduced insect feeds by inserting…

They are the epitome of avian energy, hovering, darting, and flowing like no other birds, almost as if they weren’t birds at all but rather androids or creatures borne from the sparks of…

Harvard Forest recently produced a report called Wildlands and Woodlands, A Vision for the New England Landscape. The vision calls for a long-term conservation effort that would conserve 70…

Members of the board of directors and the staff of The Center for Northern Woodlands Education met in western Massachusetts this July for a planning retreat focused on change. We discussed…

Like a forest fire that appears to be contained before exploding into an inferno, biomass has gone from being a topic of interest primarily to foresters and energy experts to one that can draw…

My son Seth and I have a tradition. Each summer, we choose a different mountain and a campground near it, pack our gear into my subcompact car, and set off on a father-son adventure. Two…