This post first ran last January, but it’s just as relevant now. Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series of vignettes about the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if […]
Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and […]
Last week I found myself on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu, part of — I swear! — a very arduous and intellectually demanding book-reporting trip. (More on that…someday.) After my grueling days of reportage, Elise and I headed up to the island’s North Shore, where, to our astonishment, we found the beaches positively littered with […]
One October morning in 2013, I walked into the Canmore offices of an organization called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, to speak with its reluctant leader. I was at the outset of my career in journalism, fresh out of graduate school and loose on the land in the Northern Rockies. With my […]
On a salmon walk last week, a friend and I encountered this battered, spawned-out chinook in the final hours of his life: his milt spent, flesh ragged and necrotic, preparing to relax into the embrace of death. We watched him swirl aimlessly in this pool for half an hour, in awe of the vibrant spirit […]
A couple of weeks ago, during a backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, Elise and I shared our campsite with a short-tailed weasel. He, or she, was lithe and frolicsome, darting over rocks and flowing around the trunks of lodgepoles in relentless pursuit of squirrels. Weasels have a sort of split reputation — they […]
Recently, and to much engagement-baiting fanfare, the New York Times published its list of the best books of the 21st century. As with any such list, it was riddled with omissions, both benign (whither Anthony Doerr, Madeline Miller, and Lauren Groff?) and insidious (outrageously, not a single Native American author made the cut). I was […]
In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House […]