The evening was warm, even for August, and the pitcher for the home team Lowell Spinners was having trouble finding the plate. Millions of white mayflies, disoriented by the bright lights of…
Features
Yankee Tarheels: Remembering the Pitch Pine Industry of Colonial America
Gone are the days when many in the Northeast relied on pitch pine, and in many cases, gone are the trees themselves. But you can still find this historic tree with the alligator-scale-like…
A Solo Traverse of the White Mountains
My walking up here is a form of yoga practice, I suppose – call it the practice of being perfectly content. I’m descending today, down a steeply sloping ridge on the eastern-most…
200 Million Years and Counting
An Illustrated Introduction to Some of our Region’s Turtles Turtles are rock stars in the animal world, noteworthy not because they’re pretty, but because they’re weird…
Back in Time: A Photo Essay
The history of agriculture is written all over the woods of southern and central New England. Old stone walls grid the landscape and seem to tie disparate stands of second-growth forest…
I Have Earned My Place: A Logger’s Year, 1936
In 1936, the United States was still struggling to escape the Great Depression. And things were especially bad in Groveton, New Hampshire – a paper mill town. Groveton’s mill fell…
The Great Forest Migration
How New England's Forests Arrived, Where They Came From, and What it Means for The Future Sometime around 12,000 years ago, the first human beings arrived in New England. We don’t…
Declining Moose Populations: What Does the Future Hold?
Nineteenth century author Henry David Thoreau marveled at the huge beast he saw deep in the Maine woods. Hoof to withers, the bull stood nearly seven feet tall – taller than the biggest…
Conservation Easements
How Long Is Forever? And Can Anything Be Done in the Meantime? My wife and I own a 100-acre farm in eastern Vermont, where we raise and sell lambs, chickens, vegetables, honey, maple syrup,…
That Signature Look: An Introduction to the Doctrine of Signatures
Looking closely at plants, we can learn a lot – about local habitat, climate, hydrology, wildlife, and soils. For example, succulent leaves indicate that a plant may thrive in sandy soil…