Braiding Sweetgrass

heavy raindrops must sound like the knuckles of spring knocking hard on the door overhead. After six months of torpor, stiff lim ...

interrupted by a road that snakes through the hollow. The pond and surrounding hills are protected as state forest, but the road ...

mechanical motion across the road, dragging a thick tail in a sinuous side-to-side wave behind it. When it stops in the circle o ...

satellite or microchip, salamanders navigate by a combination of magnetic and chemical signals that herpetologists are just begi ...

strode purposefully into the water and disappeared. My daughter was disappointed, expecting to see them loitering on the beach o ...

draw the spermatophores into an internal cavity where eggs are waiting. Safely inside, the sperm are then released from the sac ...

taking place beneath their tires. From inside the car, listening to late-night radio, you just don’t know. But standing on the r ...

into shadow and watch as the lights come nearer, a whole line of them. Who would be out on a night like this? Only someone out l ...

They tell us that frogs and toads take only about fifteen seconds to cross the road and mostly escape the cars. The spotted sala ...

installed. A drift fence is simply a length of snow fence about eight feet long, with a foot-high strip of aluminum roof flashin ...

the salamanders are moving—and dying—he can’t sleep. He puts on a raincoat and goes out to carry them across. Aldo Leopold had i ...

verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens. Their startling otherness makes it all the more remarkable that we were h ...

strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.” “Hear!” calls a peeper in the headlights. “H ...

Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire So much depends upon the lighting of this fire, so neatly laid on the cold ground and circ ...

in the woods were spent felling, hauling, and splitting. “Firewood warms you twice,” he would always say as we emerged from the ...

always have a fire. The power of that simple act—with a single match you could make people feel safe and happy, convert a bunch ...

are four kinds of fire?” I am expecting his lesson on hardwoods and softwoods, but there is something else on his mind. “Well, f ...

means participating—that the natural world relies on us to do good things. You don’t show your love and care by putting what you ...

dislodge it from the tree. But cut open, the body of the conk is banded in glowing shades of gold and bronze, with the texture o ...

fire,” he reminds them. “That’s our job, especially we men. In our way, there is balance between men and women: men are responsi ...