Magazine Series

Oftentimes the first question a young child asks upon entering a natural history museum and seeing the stuffed specimens is: “Are these real?” Barn Owl with Rust #2 begs the same…

First, a few clarifications. This trip took place neither in Switzerland nor in a Swiss canoe. What made it Swiss was the presence here in Maine of our Swiss relatives, Vreni and Ueli. Before…

Your modern chainsaw has a precision engine that can be rendered into a worthless chunk of aluminum with just a few careless mistakes, like running straight gas through it, or spending an…

Exotic invasive plants get the headlines, as they crowd out native species, deprive wildlife of food, and generally devalue the Northern Forest. But in certain cases, native plants can cause…

A decade or so ago, a friend showed me his copy of a book called Make a Chair from a Tree. Now who could possibly resist a title like that? With its step-by-step procedures for making a…

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…