Wood Lit

In Golden Wings and Hairy Toes: Encounters with New England’s Most Imperiled Wildlife, Todd McLeish takes the reader on a lively and enlightening adventure with field biologists working to…

There’s sort of a running gag in the Northern Woodlands office: “Who has the copy of New England Wildlife?” Hardly a week goes by without one of us having to raid another’s desk to nab…

In the old and idiosyncratic genre of wilderness literature, our American masterpiece is Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. As with many perennially great books, when people overcome…

Through the 31 essays that make up Letters from Eden: A Year at Home, in the Woods, author Julie Zickefoose demonstrates how truly at home she is on the 80 acres of forests and fields where…

My first reaction to the title of this book was to question how a distinguished scholar of conservation history could link “war” with an examination of forestry in America. Sam Hays began…

Anyone who’s keeps an almanac or “kitchen book” to record nature’s comings and goings in their backyard is following in the footsteps of Aldo Leopold. He said that those who seek to…

The Winooski River runs in a generally northwesterly direction through northern Vermont, connecting, among other towns, Montpelier, the state capitol, with Burlington, the state’s largest…

The author of this remarkable book states that his goal is “to present an accurate account of the seriousness of today’s global environmental challenges…and to offer a strategy for…

Through his books and his work as an educator, Tom Wessels teaches people how to observe and interpret ecological landscapes. His latest book, The Myth of Progress, reflects something of a new…

Like no other element of the New England landscape, stone walls relentlessly remind us of the challenging existence faced by those who settled this corner of the world. Stone walls chronicle…

“With all the Web sites and links, with the near infinity of information available, who has time to – who wants to – read?” Melanie Simo poses this guilt-inducing question at…

Each of the 10 chapters in this book begins at a beginning, with the author discovering a new insect or other arthropod or a behavioral quirk of a previously known one. Then we are off,…

Lone Pine’s entry into the regional mushroom literature is a solid performer, treating just over 600 species found in eastern Canada, the Great Lakes states, and New England. (It ought…

As an ornithologist, many times I have witnessed an unusual bird behavior or been astonished by a bird’s beauty. And each time, I have muttered to myself, “if only I had a photograph of…

Anyone familiar with the 1956 Boughton Cobb fern book in the Peterson field guide series will feel at home reading this new edition. The overall arrangement – text on the left,…

This is a book that cannot easily be reduced to a brief review. It defies such review because it is itself a review of the writings, thinkers, and doers of the American environmental movement…

As anyone who has ever planted a few apple trees knows all too well, growing apples can be a perplexing and frustrating endeavor. The trouble is that apples are very attractive to many of…

It’s a pleasant Saturday morning, and a small suburban park is filling with people. While the adults set up lawn chairs and dig out soccer equipment, the youngsters frolic on the grass. Just…

Trees of New England by Charles Fergus is not another field guide, and thank goodness for that. If I were to lug around all that are available these days, or even a selection of those of most…

Hikers in the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont often share a common reward when they emerge from the wooded lower slopes to the open summits: a marvelous…