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On Hunting: A Letter from the President and CEO

October 27, 2026/in Featured News Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont

What we believe, what we recognize, and what the science suggests

Northeast Wilderness Trust welcomes the hunting of prey species, including deer, turkey, and game birds, subject to state seasons and regulations, on its preserves. We do not permit trapping, bear hunting, or the hunting of predators such as coyote, fox, fisher, and bobcat. A subset of our lands, which we call sanctuaries, are closed to hunting altogether and set aside so that wildlife there experience as little human pressure as possible. This letter explains the “why” behind our policy. Practical details about our policy appear at the end.

The Foundation: Ecocentrism

At Northeast Wilderness Trust, we believe that Nature deserves the freedom to flourish.

The foundation of our work and the reason this organization exists is just that: the conviction that untrammeled Nature has a place in our modern world. This is a value proposition, not a scientific statement. It is rooted in ethical considerations, not peer-reviewed research. While there are certainly co-benefits to protecting untrammeled Nature that are supported by robust scientific evidence, no single study can quantify the value of natural freedom itself. Northeast Wilderness Trust, more than anything, is built on a set of values and an underlying philosophy.

Our mission is rooted in an ecocentric worldview. The dominant worldview in and out of conservation asks: How does this land benefit humans? What ecosystem services does it provide? What resources can be extracted from it? What recreational opportunities does it offer? These are worthwhile and relevant questions, and they drive the primary goals of a majority of conservation work. We are fortunate that much of the Northeast has been conserved in pursuit of answering them.

Northeast Wilderness Trust exists to serve another goal—an important and underrepresented one. At the very core of our mission is the belief that Nature has intrinsic value, independent of any benefit it holds for people. That some land should be forever-wild—for its own sake. We pursue goal this not in competition with other forms of conservation, and not from a position of moral superiority, but in a complementary spirit.

Viewing conservation through this lens demands a few things of us: restraint, humility, and commitment.

Restraint, because human nature is often to act: We love tinkering in the woods, whether it be to provide access for recreation, habitat for certain desired species, or timber revenue; to protect water and other natural resources; or to accomplish a number of other objectives. It is difficult to step back and trust in something that can be hard to understand, but that’s what forever-wild conservation asks of us.

Humility, because we understand far less about the living world than we think. In our effort to elevate the rights of flora and fauna, who don’t have a voice at the table, we strive to recognize that we genuinely don’t know what they would say.

And finally, Commitment, because history has shown us that when people fail to make a commitment to wilderness, deliberately and permanently, wild Nature generally suffers for it.

Northeast Wilderness Trust’s work is rooted in an ecocentric worldview, where all species are recognized as having inherent value. When we think about land, we think less about ownership and management and more about relationship. We de-emphasize resources and recreation and instead focus on reciprocity. We strive to partner with Nature and foster an attitude of respect and familial love.

Northeast Wilderness Trust attempts to apply these ideas—restraint, humility, and commitment—to the world in which we operate. Our organization is rooted in ecocentrism, practically applied. Another way of saying this is that Northeast Wilderness Trust strives to operate as a pragmatic, not a dogmatic organization. How the organization approaches hunting is emblematic of this approach.

On Hunting: Science and Values

To understand Northeast Wilderness Trust’s hunting policy, it helps to first acknowledge that there is a large body of science on hunting and wildlife management that supports multiple positions. Like all bodies of science, it is constantly evolving.

There is another consideration, which is that many wildlife agencies cite social carrying capacity (or, the reduction of human-wildlife conflict) as a primary reason for allowing hunting of certain species, particularly carnivores. Here, too, the science is not settled, and a growing body of literature suggests that coexistence education, rather than hunting, is a more effective policy.

Northeast Wilderness Trust’s hunting policy is not exclusively science-based, and we don’t claim it to be. The Wilderness Trust’s position is likewise not anti-science. It is rather that science informs but does not determine our policy, because the question of what one ought to do is never purely a scientific question. It is instead a question of values.

Our hunting policy rests on three entwined pillars: what we believe, what we recognize, and what the science suggests today. Our policies are just that: ours. They are not intended to be sweeping value statements about any activity outside the bounds of Northeast Wilderness Trust’s protected land.

We believe…

…that there ought to be some places on the landscape where wild creatures experience less stress from human activity and enjoy greater privacy from human pressures. We believe in the inherent value of wild Nature and apply that philosophy to wildlife. Self-willed Nature is a net good, and wildlife is part of that whole. Hunting regulations are a form of management, and it is therefore our position to approach hunting with pragmatic restraint.

We concede that this sits in some tension with restraint itself: pure restraint would argue against intervening in wildlife populations at all, and yet we welcome hunting of some species on our land. We accept that tension for a specific reason. In the absence of native carnivores across most of the Northeast, hunting serves as an imperfect but valuable tool for regulating prey species populations. We say more on the “why” for this determination below.

We recognize…

…that hunting is an important cultural tradition across much of our service area, and that finding common ground is both essential and pragmatic. We recognize that hunting takes many forms with meaningfully different impacts on wildlife and wildness. And we recognize that prohibiting an activity on our land is not a moral judgment on that activity or on the people who pursue it, just as our position on wilderness makes no moral judgment on logging by choosing not to permit it on our land. Northeast Wilderness Trust is not anti-anything. What we strive to be is intentional and pro-wilderness.

The science suggests…

…that carnivore species self-regulate based on prey availability, through predator-prey dynamics and bottom-up regulation. Bear populations demonstrate a similar dynamic, with reproduction contracting during mast failures and expanding during mast years. These species do not require human harvest to remain in balance with their habitat.

Prey species are a different case. Deer, in particular, were historically kept in check from the top down by wolves and cougars, both largely absent from the Northeast for more than a century. Without that pressure, deer populations can grow beyond what the forest can sustain, and the consequences are well documented.

The distinction, then, is this: populations of predators and bears are mostly self-regulating, and hunting them would remove a portion of a relatively natural process. Prey species without predators, on the other hand, are generally not self-regulating, and hunting them restores a semblance of balance.

Our Policy

To put this all together: In the absence of native carnivores, and in reflection of the above, Northeast Wilderness Trust welcomes hunting of prey species (deer, turkey, game birds, etc.) on our preserves. This position reflects both the science and the cultural traditions of the Northeast.

Beyond hunting abundant prey, our policy reflects our values of promoting wild Nature, which leads us to prioritize intact social structures and natural mortality cycles within wildlife populations. We therefore generally prohibit trapping, predator hunting, and bear hunting. We also believe that there ought to be places where human pressure on wildlife is simply kept to a minimum. We call those places sanctuaries, and we prohibit both hunting and developed recreation on them, but they remain open to the public for passive access (bushwhacking). Sanctuaries are, essentially, places set aside for wild flora and fauna in the most distilled sense.

I share this short letter not to suggest that anyone need agree with our philosophy, but to be transparent about what animates our decisions. If you have questions about our approach, I welcome the conversation.

For the Wild,

Jonathan Leibowitz
President & CEO, Northeast Wilderness Trust
2026

Photo of aerial view of fog rolling through forested mountains.

At Home at Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve

October 22, 2026/in Featured News, Field Stories v, Vermont

Four years ago, I moved into a little log cabin in a cold hollow at the edge of Vermont’s Northern Green Mountains. Tucked into a narrow valley where creeks, ponds, and slow-flowing fens meander through spruces and tamaracks, the place already felt wild and remote compared to the bustling city of Burlington, where I had attended graduate school. The cabin was surrounded by forest and overlooked a tangled, impenetrable alder swamp. From what I had gathered from the realtor, the neighboring lands were owned by a timber company, and not much was known about whether they would be logged again in the future—though my ears perked up as he casually mentioned some recently conserved land on nearby Woodbury Mountain.

A couple weeks after moving in, I heard something crash through the hobblebush across the road and saw a woman emerge from the woods carrying a hammer and signs that read, “CONSERVATION AREA BOUNDARY.” She turned out to be Northeast Wilderness Trust’s (NEWT) Vermont Land Steward, who shook my hand enthusiastically and explained that we were now neighbors: NEWT had just protected the 123-acre parcel, dubbed “The Spring Addition,” abutting my land. The Spring Addition, she told me, expanded the organization’s ~6,000-acre Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve. She informed me that my home was now surrounded on three sides by the largest non-governmental wilderness in Vermont. It was my first formal introduction to Northeast Wilderness Trust.

At the time, I was an independent ecologist, and I immediately offered to help however I could. Every now and then I would volunteer to hang signs, help remove trammels, and lead Nature walks. A couple of years later, I saw a NEWT job posting for a full-time Wildlands Ecologist that would change the trajectory of my career. But long before studying wildlands at the organization became my job, the Spring Addition’s rewilding woods and wetlands had become part of my daily life. For the past four years, I have had the unusual privilege of watching a recently protected forest begin to mature, according to the ebb and flow of Nature rather than human intervention, from my doorstep.

On the timescale of a forest, four years is barely a blink of an eye. One might assume that little would change in such a short period. But I know now that forests are dynamic, living things, as alive as the individual species that make them. While tree growth that proceeds by just millimeters or centimeters in diameter a year may seem like a slow process, some of the more profound changes experienced by a forest can happen over days or weeks.

Perhaps the most dramatic change I have witnessed in these four years was the creation of a new beaver pond on the Addition, which I documented in a previous blog post. Within days of the industrious rodents constructing a dam in a nearby alder swamp, the swamp flooded and a pond formed. I have since watched new generations of beavers grow up on the pond and a host of plants and animals move into the newly established habitat. The pond now supports a thriving population of brook trout, sought now by bald eagles, herons, kingfishers, and more. I’ve seen young moose wading in the shallows, stripping willow buds, and I’ve watched bears, bobcats, and foxes traverse the dam to cross the pond.

Then there are the changes that happen in an instant. I bear witness to falling trees more often than one might think. Sometimes I hear the crash of a birch succumbing to the teeth of a beaver in the middle of the night. Other times I witness a massive pine uprooted by an intense summer squall. And still other times, seemingly for no reason at all, a maple meets the forest floor on a calm, clear day—perhaps its lignin, the organic substance key to plant structure, weakened by fungi until it has simply reached a tipping point.

In Search of an Old Forest

September 23, 2026/in Featured News, Field Stories Maine

We drove up the night before, setting up our tents at a little New Hampshire campground near the Maine border and making plans over maps while cooking dinner on our campfire. We would start as soon as we could break camp in the morning, drive as close as we could to the border of Northeast Wilderness Trust’s (NEWT) newly protected Magalloway Wilderness Preserve, and hike the last three-quarters of a mile to the property line. We intended to be out of the woods no later than 2 p.m. to get started on our 3.5-hour drive home.

The next morning, Blue Jays fussed as NEWT’s Wildlands Ecologist Jason Mazurowski and I parked the car and pulled out our packs stuffed with gear. We had made this long journey in search of rumored old forest, but the forest around our parking spot did not instill confidence. It was clear no logging had occurred here recently, but by all appearances, the forest was of middle age, like most forests in New England. Old forest is one of the rarest forest conditions in the region, with some estimates putting the total at less than half a percent of land area.

Still, we continued on, ditching the road and entering a forest unmarred by track or trail.

Research Summary: The Importance of Structurally Complex Forests

September 16, 2026/in Research Summaries

This summary of external research relevant to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s (NEWT) conservation work was prepared by the organization’s Wildlands Ecology team. NEWT played no role in the funding, design, or execution of the research summarized here.

Study Title: “High rates of primary production in structurally complex forests”

Authors: Christopher M. Gough, Jeff W. Atkins, Robert T. Fahey, and Brady S. Hardiman

Publication: Ecology

Year Originally Published: 2019

Summary of Findings: This paper was aimed at understanding if canopy structural complexity could predict the net primary production (NPP) across temperate forests. Researchers used light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology to measure structure, and compared it to more traditional metrics like species diversity and vegetation area index (VAI) to see which metric best explains forest productivity (used in this context to refer to the net production of above-ground wood).

Using mechanistic modeling to test how these different metrics related to NPP, the authors determined that canopy rugosity (a measure of “roughness”) was able to explain 83 percent of site-level variation in NPP, outperforming all other metrics. In other words, the roughness of the canopy is better at predicting the productivity of forests in this biome than any of the more conventional/traditionally used metrics like canopy leaf area, height, arrangement, and cover.

This finding highlights the value of maintaining forest structure to increased productivity, and increased productivity of aboveground wood is also known as carbon storage—meaning more complex forests play an outside role in forest carbon storage.

Outstanding Questions/Caveats:

It is not clear whether this relationship would hold outside of North American temperate forests.
This study also found a high degree of statistical overlap between structural complexity and species diversity, but it is not clear if there is causation here, or simply correlation.
The study authors found canopy roughness/structural complexity to be the best predictor of production of above-ground woody biomass, but most ways the we model climate and carbon are not equipped to use this kind of data, and doing so might be computationally expensive or cost prohibitive.

Application to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s Work: NEWT promotes the development of structurally complex forests through the process of passive rewilding/passive management, meaning no woody biomass will be removed. This allows the forest to develop complexity over time, without the threat of a harvest resetting that clock. This paper indicates that those structurally complex forests will be more “productive” meaning they will make more wood, and therefore store more carbon than similar forests that are less structurally complex.

Link to the Paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecy.2864

Research Summary: Forest Structure Diversity Depends on Age and Management

September 16, 2026/in Research Summaries

Study Title: “Diversity of forest structures important for biodiversity is determined by the combined effects of productivity, stand age, and management”

Authors: Aino Hamalainen, Kadri Runnel, Thomas Ranius, and Joachim Strengbom

Publication: Ambio, Springer Nature

Year Originally Published: 2024

Summary of Findings: This study looked at an array of forest structural features as proxy measures for biodiversity, since these structures are needed to provide homes for many forest-dwelling species. It compared these features across forests of different productivity levels (amount of wood made by the forest per year), stand ages, and management styles. What the authors learned was that these structures naturally increased with a forest’s age and productivity level. However, intensive management, particularly clear-cutting (commonly used in Sweden, where this study took place) significantly decreases these structures across all ages. Importantly, this kind of management disrupts the accumulation of these structures, even on high-productivity sites, causing the managed sites to fall behind the unmanaged ones in the development of structural complexity and therefore biodiversity.

On average, protected and unmanaged sites tend to be of lower productivity, reserving the high-productivity sites for human uses. This study demonstrates that high-productivity forests can support the richest array of biodiversity indicators and should not be overlooked in conservation efforts.

Outstanding Questions/Caveats: This study did identify some impacts that were likely the result of previous management in the protected areas, resulting from management that took place before they were protected. Because the typical form of forestry in Sweden is clear-cutting and replanting on 60- to 120-year rotations, the impacts measured there are likely to be somewhat different from those encountered in the northeastern United States, where most forestry practices already favor leaving some legacy trees behind. The primary forest types studied in the paper are also conifer-dominated (spruce and pine forests) whereas northeastern forests are more commonly dominated by broad-leaved species, such as beech, birch, maple, and oak. Thus the relative value of certain structural features that stood out as more important in this paper (i.e. standing and downed deciduous deadwood) may shift with forest composition.

Application to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s Work: As a forever-wild land trust, NEWT protects forests across the Northeast as Wildlands. Ensuring preservation of conservation land representative of the full suite of landscape conditions, from low productivity (steep, rocky, and high-elevation lands, for example) to high productivity (fertile forests of mid- to low-elevations and deep soils) is the best way to protect the full suite of forest structural features—and thus the broadest array of biodiversity. Ceasing management on these lands promotes the gradual accrual of critical forest structures.

NEWT also works closely with many allied organizations who protect managed forests across our region. This study provides valuable insight into how best to protect and promote the accrual of important structural complexity on these lands as well, including management actions like leaving some large trees and deadwood after logging.

Link to the Paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-023-01971-9

Research Summary: Increased Carbon Storage of Wildlands

September 16, 2026/in Research Summaries

Study Title: “Adaptation and mitigation capacity of wildland forests in the northeastern United States”

Authors: Edward K. Faison, Danelle Laflower, Luca L. Morreale, David R. Foster, Brian Hall, Emily Johnson, and Jonathan R. Thompson

Publication: Forest Ecology and Management

Year Originally Published: 2023

Summary of Findings: This study compares wildlands to nearby forests that are comparable in size, climate, and geographic setting, but open to active management. The authors found that forests within wildlands store significantly more carbon than actively managed forests.

Using long-term Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data collected by the U.S. Forest Service from hundreds of permanent plots across the northeastern United States, the authors paired wildlands with comparable managed forests based on climate, underlying geology, and topography. This paired design allowed them to isolate protection status as the primary factor influencing forest structure and carbon storage.

The study reinforces the importance of Wildlands as a natural solution to climate change, featuring these key takeaways:

Wildlands store more carbon. On average, forests within Wildlands stored 20 percent more above-ground carbon than comparable forests open to logging.
Wild forests grow just as fast as managed forests. Challenging the longstanding belief that logging is necessary to maximize carbon uptake, the study found that forests within Wildlands grew just as quickly as managed forests. Across the region, growth rates were similar between the two groups. In both groups, forests that had been untreated for some time grew faster than recently harvested forests.
Wildlands have greater structural complexity. Forests with greater complexity support a wider range of plant and animal species and are more resilient to disturbances. Throughout the study area, permanently protected forests were found to have:

More large/old trees
More standing dead trees (snags)
Taller trees on average
A wider variety of sizes and age classes

These features developed after protection. When authors compared forest conditions at the time of wildland designation to conditions of unmanaged paired forests, they found no major differences. This indicates that the above benefits developed specifically because of the lack of management, not because of inherent factors in the landscape.

Outstanding Questions/Caveats:

The study only focuses on above-ground carbon and does not include soil carbon. Soil structure and biota in unmanaged systems are thought to have enormous potential for carbon storage.
Forest Inventory and Analysis plots do not capture some key measures of forest complexity, such as coarse woody debris.
Limited to northeastern temperate forest systems.

Application to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s Work: This study focuses specifically on forests within NEWT’s service area of the northeastern United States. It provides clear empirical support for NEWT’s core mission of permanent Wildlands protection, highlighting that all lands are working lands, even when passively managed.

Wildlands should be recognized as a natural climate solution
Both carbon and structural benefits increased over time, adding importance to permanent protection
Intact, unmanaged forests are functionally different than forests that merely appear intact

Link to the Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2023.121145

Research Summary: Indigenous Land Zones and Wilderness

September 16, 2026/in Research Summaries

Study Title: “Wilderness, Indigenous land zones, and regionality in North American forests”

Authors: Edward K. Faison and Nohham R. Cachat-Schilling

Publication: The Ecological Citizen

Year Originally Published: 2026 m

Summary of Findings: The concept of “wilderness” has often been framed as a Eurocentric idea, but here the authors present evidence suggesting that the idea of self-willed land existed within indigenous cultures of North America prior to European contact. While human influence in the Americas is thought to have been widespread through burning and cultivation, the paper shows that at least several Indigenous societies designated lands with functions similar to modern wilderness: places with minimal habitation and intentionally limited ecological impact on these lands.

Using archaeological and ecological evidence, the authors describe Indigenous land use as spatially distributed into distinct zones. Examples from the Intermountain West and northeastern United States suggest that intensive land use was often concentrated in low-lying fertile valleys, while upland forests and mountainous regions were lightly used for hunting, gathering, and spiritual practices. This pattern mirrors our modern-day land use where most development is concentrated in lowlands, and most large Wildlands occur in inaccessible or infertile mountainous regions.

Key findings include:

Indigenous land use was highly localized: Settlements, agriculture, and burning were largely confined to river valleys and coastal areas in relatively small patches, on the order of 10 to 20 acres.
Large upland forests were minimally impacted by humans: Upland regions, referred to as táuohkômuk (Algonquian) and titoqa-nót wétes (Nimiipuu, meaning “people-less land”) were primarily shaped by natural processes and largely absent of permanent habitation.
Human presence did not always imply intensive impacts: Many areas were visited often and used for hunting, ceremony, and travel between population centers, but cultural norms limited impact.
Population densities were extremely low compared to modern day: Estimated population densities in the northeastern United States around 1500 CE were roughly 0.15 to 0.7 people per square kilometer.
Modern wilderness areas overlap historical patterns: Many of today’s large Wildlands such as the Adirondacks and mountainous areas of northern New England align with areas that were historically uninhabited or lightly used.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that large portions of North America’s upland forests were characterized for centuries by minimal human disturbance and self-willed ecological processes. Modern concepts of wilderness mirror historical concepts of wilderness in practice, intent, and geographical distribution suggesting that wildlands conservation may be a continued tradition rather than a post-colonization concept.

Outstanding Questions/Caveats: This paper challenges the dominant narrative—popularized in works such as 1491—that human-altered landscapes were not only widespread across the Americas, but were the norm. However, it draws some sweeping conclusions from a limited geographic scope, focusing on just a small number of regions where this information was available. Areas where Indigenous land use may have been more intensive and/or more widespread such as fire-adapted forests, seem underrepresented.

The authors’ argument also relies, in part, on the absence of evidence, from which it can be difficult to draw definitive conclusions. While the ecological arguments are strong, the paper leans heavily on these patterns in landscape ecology to support its conclusions. The social and political questions of how Indigenous societies designated and use these lands are more complex and remain contested and are not fully supported by the evidence presented here.

Application to Northeast Wilderness Trust’s Work: The concept that wilderness has existed in some form in this region for as long as humans have inhabited it adds both philosophical and scientific integrity to NEWT’s mission. Rather than positioning wilderness as a countercultural response to colonization, development, and resource extraction, this insight puts wilderness in a broader perspective of carrying out a tradition of leaving land aside for self-willed processes to prevail. It also challenges the assumption that human management is needed in some systems for ecological integrity to exist, and strengthens the case for passive rewilding.

Link to the Paper: https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/epub-150.pdf

A Poor Fen of Floral Delights

August 6, 2026/in Featured News, Field Stories, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

The clouds of mosquitoes thicken as we approach the pond. We ponder, only half in jest, whether they might be a built-in defense mechanism of the rare ecosystem we’re approaching; a trial to ensure that only the most devoted reach the sodden promised land.

As I swat away in futility, Shelby Perry, NEWT’s Wildlands Ecology Director, reminds me that a greater abundance of biting insects tends to signal a healthier ecosystem.

Lovely consolation, I think, as one gets me good behind the ear.

We are dogged travelers in search of a Poor Fen. One exists on this wildland permanently protected by Northeast Wilderness Trust. Poor Fens are aquatic ecosystems anchored by a lush and soggy mat of sphagnum moss. Over time, as the sphagnum moss and other plants die, their undecayed matter forms peat, a terrific carbon sponge. While peat is a core feature of both fens and bogs, the former are mostly fed by streams, ponds, or groundwater flowing downstream, while the latter are chiefly recharged by precipitation.

The “poor” in Poor Fen refers to the acidity of its waters and the resulting dearth of nutrients. Poor Fens are more acidic than Intermediate or Rich Fens (though still less acidic than bogs) and so support a different array of species than their counterparts, though sedges, shrubs, grasses, and rushes typify all three fen types.

We come to the edge of the pond. The morning is grey and heavy with humidity, the conifers encircling the water pulsing, verdant. A crown of darker grey mountains peaks over the trees at the pond’s southern edge. Voltaic-blue dragonflies dart around us and dip down to the surface. We entreat them to feast on the mosquitoes feasting on us.

Shelby points, tiny gluttons swirling around her outstretched arm.

“There it is.”

At first glance, the stretch of shore in question looks unremarkable, aside from perhaps a slight red tint where the water and greenery meet. Bedraggled spruces rise from the vegetal carpet, undergirded by shrubs.

We set off. We curve around the pond’s edge. Sheep laurel and leatherleaf hug us as we pass. The sun comes out and, mercifully, its rays seem to banish all but the most dedicated mosquitoes.

We come out into a narrow break in the relentless tangle of shrubbery, where a stream empties into the pond. The muck is deep, and it wants to swallow my boots. I haul them out, the mire relinquishing its grip with a deflated sucking sigh, and step to a firmer tongue of ground.

Ten feet from me, poking up bashfully from the undergrowth, is a peatland celebrity, and the most enticing among the floral motivations for our journey here.

White-fringed bog-orchid. Platanthera blephariglottis, the species name meaning “fringe-tongued” for the lacy edges of its labellum, or lip, the flower’s downward-facing petal.

White-fringed bog-orchid.

I am giddy. Nearby are rose pogonia, pitcher plant, more sheep laurel. Shelby, at this point advancing into the Poor Fen while I linger on its edge, admiring this first white-fringed bog-orchid, spots sundew and small cranberry in bloom.

Pitcher plant; Rose pogonia.

By the time I rise from my crouch, my knees ache. I advance onto the sphagnum moss of the fen. This substrate sits directly atop the water, forming a peninsula of woven moss. With each step the moss around the edges of my boots swells with water; I feel the displacement beneath my soles. We tread lightly, following deer paths as closely as possible, minding our footfalls.

Shelby, still ahead of me, yells: “There are more!”

I look up. White-fringed bog-orchids dot this little spit of sphagnum moss. Each plant is at a different stage of its bloom: On some inflorescences (the mass of individual flowers atop the stalk), nearly all the buds are open, the exquisite flowers unfurled in every direction. Others are still buttoned up, waiting to blossom.

White-fringed bog-orchid.

This concentration of white-fringed bog-orchids is more than a pageant of boggy beauty. It is a rare and precious sight, given the species’ rarity in northern New England. It is also an indicator of the integrity of this ecosystem, as white-fringed bog-orchids are very sensitive to disturbance and, when stressed, will not bloom. Large-scale changes to the water table through development or agriculture can wipe out populations entirely, an ominous sign for the wellbeing of the environments in which the orchids grow. And those wider environments are already disappearing. The United States has lost more than half its wetlands since the late eighteenth century.

But here, on this wildland, given the freedom to exist and evolve according to the ebb and flow of Nature, the orchids thrive. They and their floral counterparts in this Poor Fen are protected from development and extraction permanently, their place among this wider patchwork of forests, farms, and communities safeguarded by two layers of legal protection for the land. This strategy is what makes Northeast Wilderness Trust’s wilderness preserves and easements “forever-wild,” and what ensures continuity here amongst a world otherwise characterized by breakneck change.

After we get our fill of the fen, we follow the deer paths north, into what Shelby says is a Red Spruce Cinnamon Fern Swamp. The Common Yellowthroats sing; the mosquitoes go on buzzing.

I think of something I read before we arrived here. Poor Fens can take up to 10,000 years to develop. Unprotected, they can disappear in a flash.

This one, all its wildness, endures.

A Fondness for Salamander Eggs

July 23, 2026/in Featured News, Field Stories, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

I was climbing a steep logging road on a late spring morning when I came upon a puddle. There was nothing particularly notable about it, nor about the surrounding forest, which featured neither the mossy complexity of an old forest nor the tangled, prickly chaos of a recent timber harvest. Lying in a shallow depression in the tread of a former skid trail, now rewilding, the puddle’s waters were murky from recent rains. By all accounts, it was an ordinary puddle in an ordinary, middle-aged northern hardwood forest.

But as field naturalists are prone to do, I stopped anyway. Notebook in hand, I jotted down a few of the puddle’s dimensions while swatting away mosquitoes. I was looking for evidence of amphibian breeding—a diagnostic feature for determining whether this was a bona fide vernal pool or merely a glorified mud puddle. A barred owl feather floated on the surface, wood frog tadpoles darted among the detritus, mosquito larvae wriggled about, and near the edge of the puddle, attached to a small stick, was a cluster of eggs coated in green slime.

Upon closer inspection, I realized that the green slime wasn’t merely coating the egg mass—it was growing within the mass, in the gelatinous material in which the eggs sit. Standing in ankle-deep muck beside an old Adirondack logging road, I was looking at one of the strangest partnerships in the natural world.

Strange—but Symbiotic—Bedfellows

The eggs belonged to the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum), and the mass’s green hue came from an alga (the singular form of “algae”) called Oophila amblystomatis, a name that translates fittingly to “lover of salamander eggs” or “a fondness for salamander eggs.”

The spotted salamander is a mysterious creature in its own right. For nearly the entire year, the species remains hidden beneath the forest floor, emerging only once during the first warm rains of spring to migrate by the thousands to nearby vernal pools. There, females deposit in the water gelatinous masses containing dozens to hundreds of fertilized eggs, identical to the one I had found, before returning below ground for the next 364 days. As the embryos develop through the spring, the “lover of salamander eggs” algae proliferate within the egg masses, turning their hosts a distinctive shade of green.

This association between algae and spotted salamander eggs has likely been observed for as long as humans have been peering into vernal pools, but the true extent of the relationship did not come into focus until quite recently. In 2011, researchers discovered that the algae were not merely growing within the egg masses’ gelatinous material—they were growing within the future salamanders themselves! It was the first known example of a photosynthesizing microorganism infiltrating a vertebrate’s actual cells.

The finding challenged long-held assumptions about the limits of symbiosis between life’s kingdoms. “Photosymbiosis,” whereby a photosynthesizing microorganism lives within a host, is a well-documented form of symbiosis, but usually involves and benefits a host that cannot produce or acquire its own food (also known as a “heterotroph”). Since spotted salamanders have no trouble finding their own food, they are not heterotrophs, making the relationship I witnessed all the more remarkable. (While not entirely accurate, the relationship is often referred to as the only known example of an animal “photosynthesizing,” though the algae are the ones doing the photosynthesizing.)

A Mutually Beneficial Partnership

Like most of nature’s enduring partnerships, both participants appear to gain something from the arrangement. The algae help oxygenate the egg mass and simultaneously absorb waste products, while the salamander embryos provide nutrients and carbon dioxide that fuel algal growth. It may seem like a fairly modest advantage, but when considering that only 1 in 200 eggs reaches the larval stage and only a small fraction of those larvae ever reach adulthood, even marginal benefits may be enough to tip the scales for natural selection to preserve the partnership.

This relationship is hardly the only oddity lurking in our wetlands: Wood frogs survive winter by freezing solid—their hearts stop until spring. Gray treefrogs, we now know, may actually be two nearly identical species, one carrying twice the number of chromosomes as the other. Mole salamanders have developed hybrid lineages that challenge our understanding of speciation. These are all evolutionary experiments still unfolding in the wet corners of our woods, in countless pools and puddles scattered across the Northeast.

And these fascinating puzzles are just a few of those among vertebrates, which make up only a tiny fraction of life’s diversity. The vast majority of organisms are small, inconspicuous, and poorly understood. Entire chapters of many of their natural histories remain unwritten, hidden in plain sight. Nature’s greatest mysteries are not always found in remote jungles or the old-growth cathedrals of temperate rainforests; sometimes the most remarkable stories unfold in the most ordinary places.

If such a relationship could remain overlooked for so long in one of the Northeast’s well-known amphibians, it raises an obvious question: What other evolutionary wonders have yet to be discovered throughout our rolling, rewilding landscape?

Tracking a Moose in Late Winter

April 20, 2026/in Featured News, Field Stories, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

One of the joys of working as an ecologist in land conservation is that the field season stretches year-round. One of my responsibilities at Northeast Wilderness Trust (NEWT) is conducting site visits at potential new preserves to create ecological inventories. NEWT pursues land acquisitions throughout the year, so while other ecologists often work within the short phenological windows when songbirds breed or certain plants flower, my field schedule more resembles that of timber companies and real estate agents. One upside to this expanded field season is that I get to explore new, wild places in winter, when much of the natural world lies dormant, on skis or snowshoes.

In late February in central Vermont, I set out on skis to document the ecology of a proposed NEWT preserve. At this point in the season, the snowpack is often at its greatest depth, and food resources that have sustained wildlife through the winter are beginning to run low. This past winter, in particular, brought consistently frigid temperatures and above-average snowfall. As a result, I was gliding on my skis across a landscape blanketed by more than 40 inches of snow, unimpeded by buried stumps, logs, and rocks lying beneath the dense snowpack.

Reading Moose Movement

Midway through my journey, moving easily across the terrain, I came upon a set of unusually large tracks. At first, I wondered if they might belong to a lost human wandering through these former timberlands. But as I moved closer, it became clear that they belonged to the largest of New England’s megafauna: a moose.

I had noticed signs of moose earlier that morning: nibbled hobblebush buds and chew marks left on striped maple and young red maple stems. But the freshness of these tracks was clear evidence that the animal had passed by only recently, perhaps within hours of my arrival.

I inspected the tracks and the surrounding area. Wiry hairs lay in the deep hoofprints, and fresh scat sat piled periodically atop the snow. These signs created a clear trail, and I followed it for a while, noticing fresh browse on nearly every young tree or shrub along the path. Eventually, I came upon a large depression in the snow: the clear outline of where a moose had bedded down for the night. Fresh scat surrounded the bed site, along with clumps of hair shed from its thick winter coat.

The American Eel: Rewilding Watersheds

October 24, 2025/in Featured News, Field Stories, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

As an ecologist at Northeast Wilderness Trust (NEWT), I spend most days studying wild lands. As terrestrial creatures ourselves, things often feel more familiar on land—the sights, smells, and colors are welcoming, and the wildlife we encounter is recognizable and often charismatic. But the boundaries of a wilderness preserve do not stop at the river’s edge or the pondshore; they often extend into or encompass these freshwater systems. So every now and then my Wildlands Ecology colleagues and I turn our attention to the creatures that lurk in murky depths—those perhaps less photogenic but equally crucial and intrinsically valuable counterparts to the terrestrial species we know so well.

A Slippery Mystery

The American eel (Anguilla rostrata) is among the most fascinating and yet mystifying of these creatures. Once nearly ubiquitous in freshwater streams and rivers throughout Atlantic watersheds, the American eel is now largely confined to coastal waters and undammed inland waterways. Yet their story is bigger than the familiar tale of abundance severely diminished by human intervention. The American eel has puzzled scientists and naturalists for centuries, with critical details of the species’ biology still shrouded in mystery.

The American eel is North America’s only catadromous fish. They live much of their lives in freshwater (or brackish) environments but must return to the ocean to reproduce. This life cycle inverts that of anadromous fish like salmon, which live primarily in the ocean and return to rivers to spawn.

No one has ever observed eel spawning in the wild, but based on clues from their migration, we know that their life begins in the warm depths of the Sargasso Sea off the U.S. East Coast. There, adult eels spawn, producing tens of millions of eggs, and then perish. From those eggs hatch larvae (leptocephali) shaped like willow leaves, which drift along on ocean currents for months. As the larvae approach the continental shelf, they metamorphose into “glass eels”—transparent, androgynous juveniles—and begin the journey inland toward estuaries and rivers.

Once in fresh or brackish waters, they transform again, this time into elvers, and later into yellow eels, spending years to decades feeding and growing in streams, lakes, marshes, and rivers. In the yellow eel phase, they are nocturnal, hiding in sediment, root tangles, or under logs, nourishing themselves with a wide diet of macroinvertebrates, crustaceans, small fish, and amphibians.

When yellow eels reach maturity, they change once more, now into silver eels—their bodies develop sexual organs, their eyes enlarge, and their digestion shuts down. Fat reserves sustain them on the final, long migration back to the Sargasso Sea, during which they will not consume a single meal. There, the adults spawn and die, leaving their offspring to begin the cycle anew. Since they only develop sexual organs at this final, brief stage in life, leaving them little time to breed, scientists have struggled for centuries to figure out how reproduction occurs among eels.

American Eels as an Indicator Species

This catadromous life cycle, dependent on both healthy fresh- and saltwater systems, makes the American eel a reliable indicator of wild, connected aquatic ecosystems. They move nutrients and energy from the sea far into inland waters, reaching headwater ponds and streams that other migratory fish cannot. Eels are both predator and prey, a food source for herons, otters, larger fish, and people, while also regulating populations of invertebrates and small vertebrates.

Their ability to live in salt, brackish, and freshwater—and even to climb small waterfalls and cross damp ground between waterbodies—places them among the most adaptable fish on the continent. That such an adaptable species has declined so markedly demonstrates the severe disruption that barriers like dams and culvert wreak on aquatic ecosystems. These obstructions block eels’ upstream journey as juveniles and their downstream migration as adults. Global culinary demand for glass eels puts added pressure on already stressed runs, and shifting ocean currents caused by climate change may disrupt the timing of their larval drift.

In some places, like the Penobscot River, removing obsolete dams or replacing undersized culverts has already begun to restore eel runs and the health of entire watersheds. Conserving riparian forests, wetlands, and estuaries, and allowing natural processes to restore ecological integrity through passive rewilding, also benefits these migratory fish and countless other species that depend on clean, connected, and resilient waterways. When we conserve forever-wild land with an equal focus on both water and earth, imagining not only old, intact forests but also unbroken aquatic pathways, we give the American eel—and the watersheds it sustains—a chance to recover.

Two people in the forest measuring trees

Old Trees and the People Who Know Them

July 30, 2025/in Featured News, Field Stories, Rewilding, Wildlands Ecology

On a cool and breezy summer afternoon, a team of seasoned ecologists and I made our way across a steep talus slope in a remote section of Vermont’s Groton State Forest: a 25-acre stand of ancient hardwoods known as Lords Hill. Tucked into the hills of the town of Marshfield, this forest is a rare remnant of an older age—one of the few places in the state where towering sugar maple, yellow birch, white ash, hemlock, and basswood have been left to grow, die, decay, and regenerate largely undisturbed for centuries.

We were there to revisit a long-term monitoring plot established decades ago and to measure the diameter of trees tagged as early as 1977. With me were ecologist and naturalist Charlie Cogbill, our leader, NEWT board member Brett Engstrom, NEWT’s Wildlands Ecology Director Shelby Perry, and Rose Paul, former director of Science and Freshwater Programs for The Nature Conservancy. We slowly and systematically worked our way across 50-by-20 meter grids, calling out data while Charlie stood at each grid’s center, clipboard in hand, scribbling notes, and confirming each measurement with familiarity and enthusiasm.

“Yellow birch. Tag number 451. Diameter 72 centimeters!” I called out across the talus slope, my voice bouncing off of moss-covered granite boulders.

Charlie, perched atop one such boulder, flips through his notes. “Yellow birch… 451… YES!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “That one put on four centimeters since 2002,” he added, grinning.