Wood Lit

“Is the great purpose of our species to steal the lives and homes of millions of species and billions of creatures?” asks David Johns, one of the writers featured in Keeping the…

Thanks to the recent rapid compilation of insect photos at www.bugguide.com and other websites, identification of insects has never been easier. Art Evans has taken advantage of these…

I had never thought of eastern hemlock as a forest giant until I visited the mountains of western North Carolina. In my northern New England experience, an old-growth hemlock was a good-sized…

When I was a kid, we stopped by neighboring sugarhouses a few times a year to pick up a gallon of Grade B. I’d hold the plastic jug in my lap on the ride home, and on a few of those…

Follow-the-dream memoirs comprise a good chunk of North Country literature – probably because so many of us came here looking for a better life. Taproot is one such book, and from the…

Ever since the deserved success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, readers have faced an avalanche of titles seeking to show how a seemingly banal…

If you can remember when backpacking meant hiking with an external aluminum frame pack, when hi-tech fabric meant those navy, long-sleeved polypro funk sponges with the little white horizontal…

Maple sugarmaking, as an endeavor, has not suffered from a lack of literary coverage. If you make syrup, chances are you already own Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Maple Sugar Book, which…

When I was a girl, my grandmother gave me a guide to the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains. It was a small book, bound in green cloth, with a page or two for each animal. The drawings…

Sea-run fish are often overlooked in modern life, as fewer and fewer people touch or even see the many species that once clogged Atlantic seaboard rivers. While the general modern disconnect…

The northward creep of red oaks is no secret. On late autumn days, their enduring crimson seems to drive with us up I-91. We could point to climate change, or perhaps thank forgetful blue…

If your pulse jolts hearing the rusty cackle of a turkey; if a fly made of “mallard quill thorax ribbed in gold wire ahead of a roughened white hare drubbing, no wing” is your…

If you have kids, you know that children’s books about animals usually fall into two camps: There are the basic non-fiction books that give your kids just enough information to raise a…

Thomas O’Donnell’s reminiscences of his boyhood in a remote lumbering settlement provide an amusing and entertaining description of family life in a nineteenth-century logging…

Intensely personal poetry only works if readers can recognize something of themselves, or some universal truth, or something fun or beautiful in the prose. If it’s there, the poet and…

There’s something about wilderness rescues and mishaps that seems to bring out the voyeur in many of us. Are we drawn to the cautionary tale, fascinated by the raw power of nature and…

For cabinetmakers, both professional and amateur, the name Christian Becksvoort will have the same kind of resonance that Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle will have for a baseball fan. Becksvoort…

If you are peering into one of those GPS devices many people now find indispensable, everything, anywhere, is shown in relation to your own location. With GPS, you’re always at the…

The Northeast has become a hive of ecological counter-intuition, at least by the framework of any living memory. According to Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How…

Authors and publishers of field guides, take note: the bar has gone up with A Field Guide to the Ants of New England. Ants? Ants. Lilliputian ants whose entire colony is enclosed in an acorn,…