This past weekend, during a tracking course in California (spoiler: I did not ace the final exam), we students were tasked with identifying the above gorgeous creature, found dead by our instructors on — where else? — the highway. This gorgeous little beast is a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a lithe, furtive carnivore that I’d […]
First light on Jewel Key found the tide out and the raccoons hungry. I followed one along the exposed tidal flat that rimmed the south edge of this Everglades islet, Chokoloskee Bay at our backs, the glittering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico before us. The raccoon, or her ancestors, had come here under her […]
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 she’s working on this today (Carol, if you’re […]
Earlier this week, I found myself scrolling through photos on my computer, reminiscing semi-fondly on the year that was, when I stopped short at a series of pictures from a reporting trip I took this summer to Nome, Alaska (story still TK, alas). Like many of my reporting trips, this one also doubled as an […]
Earlier this fall, I had the privilege of profiling the anthropologist and photographer Amanda Stronza, who shoots sensitive portraits of roadkill and thus restores the beauty and dignity of the wild creatures that our vehicles obliterate. Amanda’s work reveals a fundamental paradox of roadkill, one that I also explore at some length in my book: […]
This week I’m in Madison, serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, a gig that’s introduced me to many wonderful faculty, staff, and students. Among my favorite encounters, however, has been with a university resident who’s been dead for around 13,000 years. On a tour of the zoology museum, I had the opportunity to […]
Amanda Stronza found the cardinal dead on a Texas highway this June, a splash of vermillion against drab asphalt. He’d been struck by a car—a common fate for birds, as many as 340 million of whom are killed by vehicles in the United States every year. Most drivers overlook these casualties, but not Stronza, an […]
I’m on a backpacking trip this week, which makes it as good a time as any to revisit one of my favorite posts (or, more accurately, to make you revisit it). Although Colorado, our home since early 2022, doesn’t have quite the same abundance and diversity of rentable Forest Service fire towers as did the […]