On some days, one thing looks like another. It’s easy to be fooled. That’s where a pen helps. Over the last couple years I’ve been taking pictures of objects that require scale to grasp. What I’ve used as reference is my pen, so I’m starting an ongoing LWON series of photographed objects using one for […]
This post originally ran winter of 2014 and circumstances have not changed. Careful out there! There’s been a lot of road kill on my drive to work and back in Western Colorado, mostly prairie dogs and rabbits, and young magpies trying to learn how fast they have to fly to get out of the way. […]
I went up to a rock art panel in southeast Utah the other day, one known as the Desecration Panel. The sandstone wall is long and repeatedly marked by petroglyphs of animals and human-like characters about 1,500 years old, what is called Basketmaker tradition. Several are terribly defaced, the damage relatively recent. One figure, which […]
Back in January of 2014, I wrote a guest post for LWON about a morning with a dog and here it is again, only slightly fixed up. A neighbor dog and I walk up a snow-crusted hill together. Glossy black lab mad for sticks and balls, he hasn’t forgotten how to travel with a human […]
The most striking thing about Konrad Steffen is not his accolades as one of the world’s leading cryosphere researchers, but how he could light a cigarette in a 60-mile-per-hour gale screaming across the ice. He’d duck into his shoulder with a lighter and in a second or two reappear with a glowing cherry. He held […]
I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I […]
I broke a pot the other day, not just any pot but a ceramic Acoma vessel I inherited after my father died decades ago. I snatched something from the shelf, barely tapping the little seed jar, its mouth big enough for a finger, maybe two. It barely rocked one way and then the other, energy […]
When one of the founders of conservation biology passed this week at 84, I heard it was peaceful, that he was ready. I imagine Michael Soulé’s heart and breath stopping and an incredible release of feathers and bones, colors of a million beetles, a rush of eyes of countless shapes. You might say he ushered […]