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Goodbye

On September 1, Steve Long will be leaving Northern Woodlands for a fellowship at Harvard Forest. Long founded the magazine with Virginia Barlow, and served as editor and executive director…

Ducks, Beautiful Ducks: A Portfolio of Pintails, Woodies, and Butterballs

The beat changed more, and now they flew striking all together, so that their wings sung in unison as they went over his head. He stood stock still watching them, and long after they had…

Counting Bears

Biologists monitor the vitality of the “living symbol of the Maine woods.” The past two days have been disappointing for state bear biologists, and today is shaping up no…

Three Logging Systems: Matching Equipment to the Job

Dick Lewis, of Chester, New Hampshire, has been logging since he was a teenager in the late 1950s. He started with horses and then a farm tractor, each of them pulling a scoot, a rugged sled…

Powerlines as Habitat

Significant powerline projects are in the works throughout northern New England and New York, as the grid is updated to accommodate more power from Quebec. In the pages of the local papers,…

A Fiery Farewell

In Teale's 1956 book Autumn Across America he refused to see leaf fall as a sad occasion, but bear in mind that he wrote this book as he was travelling across the country, not standing at…

Long Beards and Short Tales: Our Lumbering Language

What do loggers and moneylenders have in common? When is a lumberer a lumberjack? And what the heck is a lumber room? The answers to these questions are intertangled and ancient, and can be…

The Thunderstorm Mill: Making Lumber the Old-Fashioned Way

Water power. Our ancestors, those stalwart souls who headed off into the wilderness to build new settlements, depended on it. They dammed streams and rivers to power the mills that were…

Hemlock and Hide: The Tanbark Industry in Old New York

Since the dawn of history, humans have made great use of leather. They’ve worn it, walked on it, sat on it, wrote on it. Turning animal skin into a durable product requires processing, and…

Fifty Years of Maine Stumpage Prices: Trends, Surprises, and Lessons

Anyone who reads the papers knows how badly the prices of stocks, houses, and mutual funds have done since the market peaks of a few years ago. If you don’t sell stumpage very often, you…