Wood Lit

The view – sacrosanct in many indigenous cultures – that the natural, material world is animate not inert, has long been considered as heresy by conventional Euro-American…

When we talk about trees, we often talk about the wilder among them, the rarer, the grander. And although beech trees can be wild and grand, they aren’t exactly rare. Pioneers in the…

The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild Tom Seeley is an authority on honey bees. His wonderful book Honey Bee Democracy describes how bees decide on a new home and Wisdom of the Hive is…

Have you ever found a freshwater mussel in the shallows of a New England lake or pond? They seem so secretive, pressed closed in their dark shells, their soft bodies hidden from view –…

Michael R. Canfield’s Theodore Roosevelt in the Field is not so much about Roosevelt’s conservation policies or his presidency as it is about the growth and evolution of…

When I venture into the woods – chainsaw on shoulders or skis strapped to boots – I assume that once I enter the natural world, my scattered brain will empty. I expect that worries…

Richard Power’s new novel, The Overstory, a work of fiction that prominently features trees, was released last year to a great deal of fanfare and critical acclaim. It not only made the…

Wolves, like gun control and the border wall, polarize political opinion, which is why Nate Blakeslee wrote American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West. I own eight other…

A couple of months ago I heard Thor Hanson interviewed on the radio and he said – maybe not exactly, but close – that “Keeping honey bees does little or nothing for bee…

I have an old farm field that seems to want to be a white pine nursery. If I didn’t brushhog it once a year, the trees would take over in no time. As it is, the seedlings are so dense in…

It used to be that in order to see or photograph wildlife, you’d have to be either incredibly lucky or spend hours crouched behind a blind. But now, thanks to the wide availability of…

For the past 150 years, various federal, state, and county agencies have done their best to erase coyotes from the American landscape. We have attacked them with guns, dynamite, and poison…

In this fascinating and well-researched history, scholar Silas Chamberlain traces the evolution of hiking in America from the early 1800s to today. He describes how romantic and transcendental…

Long an admirer of oaks, I was pleased to receive a copy of arborist William Bryant Logan’s book for Christmas last year. In its 300 pages about acorns and the people who ate them, about…

In 2017, spring peepers appeared in my neighborhood wetlands, on April 16, with trademark enthusiasm, broadcasting sexual exuberance across our narrow, wooded valley … a full-throated,…

The same thought came up frequently as I read Mark Mikolas’s A Beginner’s Guide to Recognizing Trees of the Northeast: I wish I had had this book when I was first learning to…

With so many good tracking books already available, you might think that all has been said on the topic. But Linda Spielman’s new addition to the field, A Field Guide to Tracking Mammals…

Being fond of plants, I expected to like Anita Sanchez’s new book about Carolus (Karl) Linnaeus. What I hadn’t expected was my emotional reaction – I found myself a bit…

I hope to live long enough to see catamounts come home to the Northeast. Not just one or two mountain lions, mind you, but viable breeding populations that haunt deer, ratcheting their…

Adventure begins with Matt’s late-spring visit to “the Pit,” a vacant lot at the edge of his neighborhood. Matt notices something he’s never seen before: water is…