In the 1980s, in the midst of the last spruce budworm outbreak, the pulp and paper industry in Maine and eastern Canada faced an unprecedented softwood shortfall. The insect was killing…

Retracing Reforestation on an Old Carriage Road For years, the sign “Old Carriage Road” marked an overgrown length of abandoned roadbed halfway up the road to the summit of Mount…

Days, sometimes weeks, before a luna moth hatches from its cocoon, it starts to move within its winter shell. Quiet bursts of rustling accompany the cocoon’s sporadic movements.…

Wood knows no boundaries. Not just wood as forest, which straddles arbitrary political boundaries throughout the globe, but wood as logs and lumber. Since humans first learned to turn trees…

One irony of ancient forests and wilderness areas – known for their absence of human imprint – is that their names conjure up associations with people. In the Sierras, the Mariposa…

After the leaves fall in October, the mountains that rise toward the Canadian border north of Jackman, Maine, begin to wear their maple like a fuzzy, gray wool blanket. Sugar and red maple are…

We carefully rolled the big spruce log with our peaveys, and it settled into place with a thunk, fitting almost perfectly over the log beneath it. A little fine tuning with axe and chisel and…

It’s late afternoon, and fine snow is sifting down into Joan and Bill Hildreth’s woods in Montgomery, Vermont. Their property lies within a large expanse of forest on the edge of…

“They had to leave the hollies,” Brian Tefft said, pointing across an opening studded with snow-touched slash to a pair of green-bowered bluebirds. “That was one…

It is difficult to describe the Theology of Birds to which I am devoted, except to compare it to what Emerson said of his own spiritual condition: “It is always fully felt but ever only…