Wood Lit

With catchy rhymes and colorful artwork, author Miranda Paul skillfully weaves the seasonal play of children with water to introduce the water cycle. Water is Water, an award-winning…

You may well remember Annie Proulx’s first book, The Shipping News – a bestseller adapted to film, or her story “Brokeback Mountain,” which became an Oscar-winning…

I was a bit swamped by new, amazing bird information a couple of years ago when I read Bird Sense, an earlier Tim Birkhead book. This new book, The Most Perfect Thing, is just as good, and…

About 25 years ago, I was thrilled to learn that Russian scientists had introduced radioactive material into a tree and found the same material in nearby trees, proving that trees are…

New Hampshire’s Hubbard Brook Research Forest is a testament to how much can be gained from an enduring commitment to scientific research. Over the past 50 years, hundreds of researchers…

The North Country lost an iconic writer when Howard Frank Mosher died this past January after a battle with cancer. Mosher wrote 11 novels and dozens of short stories set in Vermont’s…

Without making a partisan political statement, I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of ways America is greater than it’s ever been. Consider cooking. Thanks to the proliferation…

In 1979, Laura and Guy Waterman came out with the acclaimed Backwoods Ethics, a book that advocated low-impact hiking, camping, and alpine management. This is a rerelease of that book with a…

My wife and I spent a summer 25 years ago living with a crow. A veterinarian acquaintance had been given a fledgling that had fallen out of a nest, and through a series of handoffs the bird…

Dean Bennett begins this memoir by reminding his readers that, in days gone by, the most important enterprise in the small Maine town of Locke’s Mills used to close down on the first day…

Have you, too, been annoyed by books that should have been abbreviated and published as pamphlets – how to change a tire, organize your garage, or how to make kimchi? I was ever so…

This is an unusual book, deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Gordon Russell chronicles his observations of Great Meadow, a marshland in New Hampshire, from 2000 through 2014. The power of…

In The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, biographer Andrea Wulf provides an intimate view of a man who spent a lifetime sharing what he learned with the scientific…

A centennial edition of The Holy Earth was recently published, and it brings back the words of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858-1954), a remarkable individual whose contributions to the well-being of…

One day last fall I trailed behind Ted Levin when he went to check up on his snakes. The day was so hot that most were out of sight in cool rock recesses, but even now, recalling the sound of…

I’ll never forget the day I learned that certain bees nest on the ground. At nine years old, I was the self appointed neighborhood nature guide. One summer, as we entered the woods, a…

A frog that sounds like a duck. A fairy shrimp that swims upside down. A fat salamander with bright yellow spots. These are some of the inhabitants of vernal pools whose lives are explored in…

Over the last 35 years, Phyllis Austin has earned a well-deserved reputation as Maine’s premier journalist covering forestry and environmental issues. In 2008, she published her first…

The Forest Unseen is, at first glance, a painstaking scientific exploration into the lives of organisms inhabiting a one-meter circle of rocky, old-growth forest floor – but that is just…

Not so very long ago, collecting the eggs of birds was one of the most common activities in the life of budding young naturalists. However, with the passage of such foundational conservation…