Assateague The waves curl in and lave the shore, drop their cargo of shells and polished glass, then withdraw, clawing back the sand. Sanderlings scatter, poke and pick, flee incoming waves, chase them back out, reverse, repeat. I stand on spongy sand, solid enough if a bit shaky, sea foam washing my feet. Somewhere to […]
Month: April 2022
It’s been over half century since researchers dreamt up the idea that grandmothers exist chiefly to enable their children to have their own children, thereby increasing the genetic fitness of the family lineage. In the 1980s, Kristen Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, bolstered this so-called “grandmother hypothesis” with her studies of the Hadza […]
It’s been 15 years since my one and only contribution to the Confluence Project, an achievement I savour to this day. The goal of the online repository is ambitious, but seemingly simple: to store photos—and perhaps a little travel story—from the intersection of every integer degree of longitude and latitude in the world. So far, […]
This post first ran in July 2019. In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in […]
Last weekend I went to the zoo, something I hadn’t done in at least two years and probably much longer. A friend was visiting with her kid, a zoo enthusiast who’d been looking forward to it for weeks. While at the zoo we saw many wondrous things. Two Asian elephants. A number of surprisingly giant […]
Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to […]
This post originally appeared on April 15, 2020. I’m republishing it today because 1) I’m deep into editing a book that includes a chapter on Wyoming’s mammal migrations, so mobile elk are top of mind; and 2) bands of elk have begun wandering through the fields near my house in Colorado. I’m not sure where […]
Oh jeez I should not write about this. I don’t even want to. I’m doing it anyway. It’s this professional tension between senior women astronomers and junior women astronomers which I hear about it from the juniors, not a lot and never loudly, but intensely. I think — I think — I see both sides […]
