The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubted Max’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth […]
This week Elise and I completed one of our lives’ great adventures, the John Muir Trail, the legendary footpath that wends along the granitic spine of California’s Sierra Nevadas. In point of fact it’s more accurate to say that she completed it, walking virtually the entire 200-mile course from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney’s […]
On the roadside the ground squirrel snacked The remains of a lunch, he attacked Now he’s developed a taste For anthropogenic food waste Beware, lest you be rodent carjacked.
A couple years back, during a day cruise around the Channel Islands, we found ourselves surrounded by a sizable school of common dolphins. (Not a mega-pod, alas, but even a few dozen dolphins is a pretty awe-inspiring sight.) Common dolphins are, as their name suggests, among the most abundant marine mammals in the world; it’s […]
For a recent edition of Smithsonian Magazine, I wrote a retrospective on the life and career of Marie Fish — ichthyologist, bioacoustician, and epitome of nominative determinism. Fish spent decades recording marine animals in her laboratory and at sea, and revealed that, far from being the “silent world” described by Jacques Cousteau, the ocean was […]
Among the many rewarding aspects of my well-documented beaver obsession is this: it makes for interesting road trips. Roads tend to follow water, which means that you stand good odds of encountering Castor canadensis and its works during any long drive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screeched to a halt on a […]
The other day I was rifling through a drawer in search of a notebook — I have a filing system best described as “post-tornado” — when my hand touched an old external hard-drive. I plugged it into a USB port, and years of photos, many of which I’d assumed were lost forever, bloomed on my […]
This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for a year and change at that point, and we’d taught her the basics: to sit, to […]