Wood Lit

“I’ll be darned; the little critter is sharper than I give him credit for,” writes now-retired Maine Game Warden John Ford of a young warden recruit. Together, with another…

It’s a guidebook, but hardly one to slip in the backpack or back pocket while hiking. With its glossy color photos, New England’s Natural Wonders: An Explorer’s Guide, by…

Genevieve Jones was ahead of her time. Born in 1847 in Circleville, Ohio, into a tight-knit and nurturing family, she grew up observing the natural world with her father, Nelson, and her…

Environmentally conscious Americans have been partaking, for some time now, in long, spirited, and often muddied discussions about energy. Whether it’s wind, hydro, wood, nuclear,…

One thing that still amazes me about living and working in Maine is the amount of ecological diversity one can find in a fairly small area. The other day, I came across a black spruce stand…

On a December morning, a decapitated buck, one leg hacked off, showed up in a gully near my home. Once I deciphered what was bleeding in the tawny leaves, I begged my neighbor with a backhoe…

Cedric Pollet’s Bark: An Intimate Look at the World’s Trees ranks with the day in November 1972 when I walked into Chartres Cathedral and saw the magnificent stained-glass…

If you’re going to get a casual reader interested in a 442-page history of anything, you’d better have an engaging subject matter. Fortunately for Eric Jay Dolin, the fur trade is…

By the time you read this, the annual banquet of fiddleheads may have passed, but a cornucopia of other wild foods, medicines, and materials are available to anyone who cares to discover them.…

Roger Tory Peterson, a man in need of a big biography, finally has one. At 422 pages, Elizabeth Rosenthal delivers a thorough and masterful account of the man known to friends as the “King…

Elisabeth Tova Bailey was a vigorous, outdoorsy woman living in Maine when she contracted an enigmatic virus or bacterial infection, possibly while vacationing in a Swiss village or on the…

I’ve long been an admirer of Cathie Pelletier’s Mattagash novels. In The Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks, and The Weight of Winter, she creates a fictional territory as rich…

I first read Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac in 1971; every year since, I’ve scanned it, quoted from it, lost it, bought it again, moved it, traveled with it, given it as presents, worn…

As a forest ecologist, one of the things I really enjoy about my work is being able to observe how trees and other plants grow in different combinations in different regions. For example, a…

There are some 90,000 species of insects in North America, far more than any other group of organisms (compare this to the approximately 700 bird species found in the same geographic area).…

“The woods are filled with stories, many of them undiscovered,” writes Uldis Roze. “Careful observation of almost any organism is likely to yield surprise and delight.”…

After reading this book, you might find yourself having a panic attack the next time you press a spade into topsoil. There are myriad creatures– many are bizarre and many are beautiful…

To assimilate the full value of many books, a reader must start at page one and continue to the end. Other books, however, may be consumed, like a rich dessert, a portion at a time. Such is…

On September 6, 1901, the day President William McKinley was mortally wounded in a Buffalo, New York, train station, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was in Vermont. He was there to study the…

Who knew? David Allan Sibley’s natural history interests do not end with birds. Nearly a decade after the appearance of the landmark Sibley Guide to Birds, we now have a bookend volume -…