Wood Lit

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 -…

N. Scott Momaday writes, in The Man Made of Words, “The storyteller’s place, within the context of his language, must include both geographical and mythic frame of reference. Within that…

One morning I followed a link sent to me by a friend and found that I had been quoted in The New York Times. That’s not a thing that happens often to woodshop teachers. The article cited my…

Amongst the multitudes of wildlife field guides, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods (With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts) is unique in that it deals exclusively with animals that do not…

Over the past 100 years, the Maine Forest Service has published 14 editions of a book (originally a booklet) called The Forest Trees of Maine. To celebrate the centenary, the newest edition…

Henry David Thoreau looms over us from the depths of history, a towering person, important we’re told, a giant of his age, yet vaguely threatening, unpleasantly Puritanical, and more than a…

An Atlas of the Connecticut River Watershed in Vermont and New Hampshire The Connecticut River divides and connects the Twin States yet borders the less-populated side of both. As a result,…

Research suggests that female wood frogs exercise no choice in their mate; rather, the male frog “chooses” them. “Why then,” Bernd Heinrich asks in his new book, “do male wood frogs…

Any reader might well ask, on first hefting this 586-page book, “Isn’t it too long?” This reader’s answer is an unqualified “No.” I can’t claim I read it in one sitting, but if…

Biology, History, and the Fate of an Endangered Species Every once in a while, a book comes along that defies categorization. Such is the wonderful, slithering conundrum that author Jon Furman…