How One Vermont Forester Brought a 175-Acre Woodland Back to Life

A black bear visited Ethan Tapper’s orchard in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains this spring. It grabbed a young pear tree, bit down, and ripped the trunk in half. Days after Tapper cut the damaged branches, the tree started to resprout; immediately a white-tailed deer ate the new shoots. “They’re trying to make me quit,” he says. “It’s not going to work.”

Tapper’s persistence has been key to his efforts restoring this 175-acre property from a degraded forest into a healthy ecosystem. It’s a process he’s documented in his best-selling 2024 book, How to Love a Forest, and to an audience of 175,000-plus followers on Instagram (more than a quarter of the population of Vermont). In October, Tapper will publish a follow-up book, The Forest Year. The new release chronicles the seasonal rhythms of the recovering forest and documents the never-ending cycle of stewarding the ecosystem for the long run. 

Through his work, Tapper argues that letting nature take its course sometimes isn’t enough. To help forests heal—especially in the face of climate change, disease, and invasive plants and insects—people often need to intervene. “A lot of people think that, well, you can’t really improve on nature; nature has all the answers, and in time we’ll get to the proper outcome,” says David Paganelli, a longtime Vermont county forester and Tapper’s mentor. “I don’t think that’s the real case anymore.” 

Despite his commitment to this patch of woods, which he’s dubbed “Bear Island,” Tapper first came here reluctantly. While working as a county forester and living in nearby Burlington in 2017, he saw the parcel listed on a real estate website for dirt cheap. When he visited the hillside property, next to the interstate with a power line running through it, he thought it was the unhealthiest forest he’d ever seen.

Like much of New England, the land had once been clear-cut for pasture. After the forest regrew, it was used as a woodlot. Loggers took the healthiest trees and left the diseased, stunted ones behind. Eroded logging roads snaked through the property, and a large clearing, formerly used for storing timber, was covered in trash. Though Tapper wasn’t sure he could restore the land, he decided to try. An insurance settlement from a carpentry accident, which blinded him in one eye as a teenager, had left him with enough money to purchase the property—and get to work.

He started by picking out the healthiest trees to save and cutting the surrounding ones that were competing for resources. He did that over and over again, freeing up each selected tree’s crown. In the trash-filled clearing, Tapper decided to build a pond. “I was like, ‘Well, I can’t mess this up any more,’ ” he says. He and a friend rented an exca­vator and dug a pit that measured 20 feet deep and half the length of a football field. “Within months, there were frogs and salamanders,” he says. “They just found it somehow.”

Today the entire forest has transformed. Bracken as tall as a toddler and other ferns with fanciful names like Christmas, cinnamon, ostrich, and maidenhair fill the understory. Tapper tends an orchard with more than 100 fruit trees and plans to start tapping his maples for syrup. Along with the new growth have come American Redstarts, Veeries, Black-throated Blue Warblers, and Mourning Warblers. All the birds hold a special significance for Tapper, who in 2023 became one of Audubon’s first endorsed foresters in Vermont. He credits the program—which trains professional foresters to create quality habitat for birds and other wildlife—with turning him into an avid birder.

Tapper’s reverence for these ecosystems is paired with an acknowledgment that his work involves compromise. “If you’re, like, ‘I love trees; I don’t ever want to cut a tree,’ there’s a lot of stuff that then we can’t do,” he says. He has applied herbicides to control invasive species, hunts deer to manage the overabundant population, and sells timber from his property.

While these practices can seem counterintuitive, Tapper is eager to explain his choices to anyone who might take issue with them. “That takes guts,” says Tim Duclos, an ecologist and forester with Audubon Vermont who leads the endorsed forester program in the state. “And I respect the hell out of him for it.” When he published his first book, Tapper began posting on social media to promote it. Since then, he’s recorded hundreds of videos laying out his hands-on forestry philos­ophy, like why he cuts trees and the importance of creating habitat. He also explores ecological topics from how deer decide what to eat to the history of turkey domestication in North America.

Meanwhile, his restoration work continues. Every fall, he hunts deer. During the winter, he drives heavy machinery across the frozen ground to reach trees to saw down. In the spring, he prunes the orchard and plants young trees, surrounding each one with a wire fence to protect it from grazing animals. And throughout the summer, he pulls up invasive plants like Japanese barberry, multiflora rose, honeysuckle, and bittersweet vines. “And I will forever,” he says. 

Though the work is never done, lately Tapper has been focusing on a different priority with his land. “One of the most important things I can do,” he says, “is just enjoy it.”

This story originally ran in the Fall 2026 issue as “The Long Haul.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.