We were maybe 10 minutes down the trail when Nancy Sferra made the announcement. “We’re now officially in old growth.” A few steps had taken us from one type of forest, a…

Ethan Pond, a small pond high in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, is not only where a trout-fishing addiction began for me, but it’s also where some of the earliest observations of…

Forests are complex systems. The Earth’s climate is a complex system. When you put them together, you get something even more complex. Complexity upon complexity, as it were. It’s…

Jens Hilke, a conservation planning biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, stood beside his colleague, James Brady, a biologist with the Vermont Agency of Transportation…

A regular chore of mine is to dispose of the mice and moles trapped in our home. I place them on a 4 x 5-foot patch of dirt and rock – which I have named the grave site – beside my…

His assignment was to train gauchos to be loggers. That’s what the Peace Corps hoped Brett Chedzoy would accomplish in Argentina in the 1990s. “I wasn’t too…

Walking in the New Hampshire woods, I mark my trail with eau de DEET. Chickadees twitter judgmentally in the hemlocks: “She’s wearing the CDC-recommended, permethrin-impregnated…

On the western side of Vermont, the Otter Creek wanders leisurely through hayfields before easing into Lake Champlain. Wildlife abounds, with shore-nesting bald eagles and ospreys,…

The canoe scraped noisily onto the gravel bar on the point of one of the great bends in the northern Connecticut River. I’ve stopped to see a remnant of the floodplain forest that once…

Growing up, I spent many summer afternoons along the banks of a local canal snatching painted turtles as they basked on fallen logs. For many of us, turtles are the gateway animals that start…