One might think I would run out of things to see, learn, and explore when I step out of my cabin. Instead, every observation is in the context of the similar or the different at some past time or in relation to something else. The expected provides a standard, and the more acutely drawn from experience, the more the differences stand out. This is true for at least one thing every day, and there is hardly a day in my week derived from a preplanned schedule, which creates the freedom to notice something new.
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But that new is, at times, predicated on what came before. I am fond of the English philosopher and biologist Herbert Spencer’s quote of 1860 in Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical: “Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. . . . where imbedded treasures were found.” I have been led to those “lanes and hedgerows” and found more than one can imagine, and I hope to share some of that journey in and of the forever changing biology and spectacle of the Northern Forest that is boundless.
In winter I can’t wait until spring, then in summer I look forward to the fresh breezes of autumn when the leaves light up in a blaze of yellows, reds, purple. Fruits are ripening and the birds are overhead migrating day and night, guided by the sun and stars on their mind-boggling journeys. Then a day arrives when some snow crystals drift tranquilly down, as if nature is going to sleep, but at some point, raging storms follow that challenge the trees right down to the roots, and I know it will be a long haul until spring.
It is a land of winter snow and ice storms, summer heat and, at times, fire, drought, and floods.
In my writing, I aim to provide a feel for the Northern Forest in the context of its hugely seasonal background, but with prognosis into the future. I focus on the life of this forest from connections in everyday living in all seasons in and around my home in these mountains of western Maine. I examine the life encountered during recent real walks in this virtual walk through the forest by my cabin since retiring here. I hope to provide a fresh look into the western mountains of Maine through foresight and hindsight.
Covering an expanse of about 6.6 million square miles, the Northern, or Boreal, Forest is a vast sea of spruce, fir, and larch, with birch and poplar mixed in, that stretches north to the treeless tundra and the grass steppes of Siberia and North America. Southward it blends into a mix with deciduous broad-leaved trees that annually shed their leaves. Similar plant progressions occur by altitude on the mountains, along with the forest’s famed denizens, the wolf, coyote, moose, black bear, lynx, snowshoe hare, tick, mosquito, midge, deerfly, and blackfly.
It is a land of winter snow and ice storms, summer heat and, at times, fire, drought, and floods. All life in this immense forest confronts vast and sometimes rapid changes as one season (and even one day) brings with it a different environment, so much so that its plants and animals have evolved to cope not only with the seasonal extremes, but with the often large changes occurring within them.
Weather makes the seasons, but it is also often contrary to them. Where I have lived in my cabin in the Maine woods for the past sixty-five years, I have experienced tree-killing snowstorms in early June after the trees have leafed out. There are Christmases without snow, and there is rain turning to ice in January. Along with preparations for the seasons, plants and animals respond to the weather, or are responded to, facing life-threatening situations that to us can seem only bothersome as we sit before our fireplaces, cast-iron stoves, propane burners, and furnaces fueled by wood, coal, or oil. Having felt the cold, and at times the heat as well, while living in the woods full-time, I am naturally curious, and sometimes astounded, by what behaviors and physiology can accomplish to make this habitat not just our home, but much more so.
Most of my life’s focus is on this forest tract of about five hundred acres where I grew up and then settled. It is secured under a Maine Forest Society easement, which designates what is and is not allowed. A century ago, here was a huge farmstead of orchards and stone wall–enclosed pastures for cattle, then sheep. My land has remnants of five old seasonal camps, aside from its farm homesites, although there is barely a trace of a residence ever having been there, except when a close search reveals the remains of a wheel and axle of an automobile, or a trace of a chimney gradually returning into the soil and becoming clothed in dense forest, or stone walls that were once cattle and sheep fences.
The one-acre clearing I live in is reserved for agriculture and two minimalist dwellings along with the typical farm garden that takes some doing every year to keep down the weeds and the competing young maple, birch, ash, poplar, and cherry trees. It is an expanse of two species of goldenrod, fireweed, milkweed, blackberry, raspberry, and blueberry, as well as six species of other berry bushes, primarily viburnums.
As far as I know, nobody was ever critical of the facilities at my log cabin at the west end of the old farm.
The human presence has increased ecological diversity. Mine is an “artificial” oasis and the only place in the acreage where monarch butterflies, bumblebees, yellow-throated and chestnut-sided warblers, indigo buntings, tree swallows, a pair of bluebirds, and green snakes reside. It also contains a dug hole, now a pool where several species of frog and spotted salamander spawn, the larval home where damselflies, dragonflies, water skimmers, giant water beetles, water bugs, mayflies, and mosquitoes are generated. This open space is the only place for miles where the woodcocks sky dance in spring, as they need a treeless landing space in between successive courtship flights.
As far as I know, nobody was ever critical of the facilities at my log cabin at the west end of the old farm. There is no such thing as a hot shower, but there is running water. It comes from a rock-lined fifteen-foot-deep well dug a century or two earlier, now only a hundred yards into the encroaching woods. Some years it has gone dry, and when it did, I descended to the bottom, stepping on the stones of its wall as a ladder. There were no skeletons at the bottom, just various farm implements (an axe, a bark spud used for peeling bark off fresh tree trunks, a chain, and various minor trinkets). The well had been well used for the kitchen and the cattle. It is the only water source within a half mile, until it rains or snows in the winter.
The current outhouse is usually a mere minutes’ walk from the front door, although distance varies, depending on where the next hole is dug. The seat is deliberately situated for maximum forest and sunrise view, and over the years the neighboring field had been an apple orchard pruned out to favor maturing maple trees that are used for tapping. I wondered at one time if I would live to see them to this stage and am now delighted that I can get ten times more syrup than needed strictly dependent on effort.
The camp parties with University of Vermont students are not so loud and rowdy as when a hundred or so eager helpers volunteered to build a giant aviary into the nearby woods and then later showed up again for the raven roundups to populate it and produce the wing-tagged and radio-labeled birds. The hundreds we trapped revealed much more than we thought possible, and I won’t forget them—helpers and birds—as emissaries of the wild. Nor will I forget Jamie Wyeth trudging up the hill with a huge packet of shrimp to one of our parties, asking to see ravens or photos of them to paint, and I suggested better: dropping a dead cow in front of his window by his lighthouse. He got what he wanted, and I did too—an original painting of one of those ravens that visited his cow.
The huge wooden table in the log cabin has become crowded with signatures carved into it by most of the visitors. A note when I’m not at home states: “Have a beer, that is here and carve your name on the table.” Solar panels now provide power for electric lights—a vast improvement since I started with a kerosene lamp, which went extinct with the invention of the propane lamp, then the electric from a car battery, to now solar panels. No one step to the other had ever been imagined. I’m now mostly hampered by all of the electrical marvels, as it turns out they are inadequate for everything that used to be simple, doable, not costing a fortune, and which never once caused headaches without a solution.
I have stayed a near lifetime associated with a specific area of wild forest in these mountains. Papa lost everything, including his mother, in World War II. He fought in both world wars after enlisting to save his life, and often declared that cities are bomb targets, but the woods aren’t—they are full of treasures. The biggest treasures for me in Hahnheide—the forest we escaped to—were bird nests.
One I recall specifically was that of a wood thrush up in a spruce tree I climbed. To my surprise, the sky-blue eggs were nestled on metal tinsel like we’d found in the woods and used to decorate our Christmas tree. I later learned that the tinsel had come from the sky. It had been dropped to disrupt radar of the bomber attacks that burned and leveled nearby Hamburg. Planting trees has always given me a positive feeling, an act for the future, and indeed, when I now see an alley of trees I’ve planted from seedlings, it makes me feel good.
It was all like an impossible dream come true.
My memories of Maine date back to age twelve in 1952. One of my first memories is of a porcupine in an oak tree that’s within jogging distance of my cabin now. That tree is still in place, but there were then no wild turkeys in New England. Porcupines remain as before, and I got to know a baby one almost immediately, and loved to pet it, of course only stroking it in one direction. It reminded me of the European always comical “hedgehog,” or as we called it, Igel, that could roll into a ball for protection, whereas the porcupine instead slaps you with its thickly muscled tail armed with spines, whose ends are like tenacious fishhooks.
Within months of my family’s arrival from Germany, my new native Mainer friends, Floyd Adams and Phil Potter, introduced me to fishing for perch, catfish, bass, and sunfish in our nearby Pease Pond, and then to the sport of finding bee nests in hollow trees in the fall, when the goldenrod was in bloom just before the wild asters’ flower buds opened in blue splendor. Grouse and deer hunting would start soon, along with the kaleidoscope of colored leaves falling. In summer I had picked tomato hornworms off our neighbors’ plants, and Phil Potter taught me how to trap the long-tailed white weasel to sell its fur, as he had done as a teenager. It was all like an impossible dream come true.
It is no mystery that I bonded so quickly to the forest where our family had landed by events that astound me still. But then, after just one idyllic year in the Maine paradise with our neighbors and our soon-owned equally idyllic farm, my parents left for six years hunting birds for the Yale Peabody Museum. They were capitalizing on their previous experience hunting birds in the jungles of Indonesia, Persia (Iran), and Burma (Myanmar), which they did for various museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which we as a family visited on the day we stepped off the Batory, an ocean liner that passed the Statue of Liberty before docking in New York City. The AMNH already contained many specimens from my father’s long-standing contributions to the study of ichneumon wasps and other creatures of decades previous, whetting my passion for contact with nature in the wild—an experience that could only be imagined then but would eventually happen.
What actually followed for me and my younger sister Marianne was six years at a boarding school for disadvantaged kids. While potentially an ideal environment—some three thousand acres of prime Northern Forest along the Kennebec River—yet I sorely missed my former freedom of the wild and chafed from domesticity with a dorm mother demanding house chores daily. In spirit I was more in line with Tarzan of the Apes.
So I ran away to go back home (near where I live now) in the woods by Mount Tumbledown. I was sixteen, and Mamuscha—my mother—(in a letter I found recently) declared that my letters (to her in Africa) were “those of a ten-year-old, in penmanship and in text.” Admittedly, I cared for neither. But due to luck and circumstance, I nevertheless ended up with a University of Maine master’s degree (with a thesis on Euglena) that the faculty awarded me “with distinction” and even had me give a departmental lecture on my work.
I had loved it decades before I’d lived it, but I knew what it was long before even then.
This paved the way for a fellowship and a PhD at UCLA (with a thesis on the tomato hornworm moth) that was also awarded the same accolade, but this one had followed a full year of total failure on a project that had not been based on observations from the wild. My unexpected success with the tomato hornworms had been possible from my direct contact with nature. In this case it was ultimately derived from weeding the gardens of my youth and having been familiar with the hornworm caterpillars that I’d then raised as a teenager to see become huge moths for my collection.
My mother had not been happy with me running away from boarding school after having been there only four years, and she never forgave me. She was also not happy years later when I returned home during the summer break from teaching at UC Berkeley with my then wife Kitty, our shepherd dog Foonman, and two pet ravens. When we arrived at the farm, my mother made sure I wouldn’t inherit it, as I had foolishly thought I might. So I asked Mike Graham, a real estate agent (and previous dormmate at the University of Maine), to keep an eye out for me for a lot to build a cabin on, no matter how small it might be. It ended up much larger than expected and up in the hills precisely where Floyd and Phil—my everlasting friends and mentors—had introduced me to the Maine woods.
The land I settled on was called Adams Hill, although it then changed names and became York. I don’t care what its name is, as long as all my friends know it is, and it is Nature’s. I’m not sure how one should own land, or air or water, except to love and respect it for what it is. I had loved it decades before I’d lived it, but I knew what it was long before even then.
It was, until the 1930s, a dairy farm with two huge barns and an impressively large manor next to an orchard of the Ben Davis apples, known as “a good keeper,” a variety that resisted spoilage and was shipped (literally) to England. When I first went there (a year before boarding school), several mature trees remained, although the brush from the seeds of the surrounding forest had grown for several decades, and the site was ideal habitat for anything that liked to eat apples: deer, bear, grouse, porcupines. The adjacent landscape of overgrown pastures was a mix of coniferous and deciduous trees, with enough space between to allow blueberries to spread. I was undecided for a while on whether to clear the brush and trees to make a blueberry field or to let the trees grow. I let the trees grow and have since sold a harvest of pine logs.
I have a reason for every tree taken, and the question I always ask myself before cutting is, “How will it affect the future growth at that place?”
Another pasture on the west side of the hill was much farther along in the natural progression, and the pines there are now likely among the largest in the state. They have been placed under official protection “into perpetuity” by the Forest Society of Maine, which owns the easement. Other sections of the forest are officially designated “growing wild,” either totally (no forest intervention permitted) or “logging permitted” under the supervision of a forester, whose mission is to maintain a forest, such as I am doing personally when I’m harvesting firewood.
With modest amounts needed (six or seven cords per year), I can be choosy and get enough wood close to the path that I can carry it to my truck. I favor dead or dying trees, especially those that are small, such as spruce and balsam fir, considered the most abundant in the state of Maine. They grow quickly and die quickly too, even if they are in full sunlight and without competition.
With no pressure of industrial harvesting, requiring massive amounts of logs taken in a short time from a large space, I can be selective. I have a reason for every tree taken, and the question I always ask myself before cutting is, “How will it affect the future growth at that place?” Because in this forest there is potential for any of a dozen tree species, and a hundred individuals can sprout from almost any square yard.
But I normally choose between one or another tree of the mix that has already been selected by the forest itself over the last decades. I can help it along on its innate trajectory and at the same time express biases—for example, to keep it forest as opposed to something like a corn crop—the choices embracing a future and acknowledging a past. That means that my over-five-hundred-year-old yellow birch that is hollow will stay. And a big white birch that is two arms’ length around the trunk is a unique individual not to be sacrificed when there are so many others that will help younger trees grow.
Near this thick birch is another that is thin and that reaches even higher, but it has been leaning toward one side, toward an opening in the forest canopy and shading a young chestnut tree nearby. The tall thin birch has little future compared with others, some even standing tall. So, as I look around, I decide that this may be the one to take, helping that well-placed American native chestnut reach the sunshine in the spring.
Each forest develops into a unity, from small to ever-larger relationships and the niches it provides for sun from above the ground in the canopy, to the water it holds in and on the ground, in its vernal pool puddles and its competition. Further, I consider the landscape, the woodcocks’ dancing field, the field for flowers for bees.
Also, I consider water. And for me at camp, the closest puddle is one that I’d dug to attract a pair of wood ducks and perhaps water striders, dragonflies, mayflies, but not too many mosquitoes. Wood frogs were not on my mind and became a first great gift of nature at a time when I had the experience and knowledge to have something to look for in them and hopefully to see. They came to the pool first thing in the spring, and they cannot be missed because their presence is announced by a loud communal chorus and an orgy of mating and egg laying for several days.
The pool holds a literal cloud of thousands of tadpoles and froglets before fall, which the broad-winged hawks nesting nearby feed their young on. Fair enough, as in the fall I’d be feeding on the trees for wood, sugar syrup, and the black cherries so many birds like, too, as well as a deer (hopefully) that would have fed on the young chestnut trees growing in the forest, amid the thousands of frogs feeding on every insect in sight, which feed on me.
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From The Common Uncommon. Used with the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2026 by Bernd Heinrich
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