This post first ran in 2023 Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: […]
Tomorrow, I fly down to the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina, to apply some small tracking tags to penguins before they set off on their journeys north. I wrote this post a few years ago at the end of the same sort of trip, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the […]
My wife and I have an ongoing debate about whether I take too many photos. Or, more to the point, whether I keep too many of the photos I take. The matter has come to a head lately because our photo account just filled to 89% capacity. We get warnings all the time now. I […]
I am lately returned from Punta Tombo, the Magellanic penguin breeding colony in Argentina where I spend several weeks each year. One of my tasks there is to open the field season in late October, which means I spend a lot of the early days stumping around our designated study areas looking for study penguins. […]
This post first ran in 2023. One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front […]
Our neighbors of ten years moved away about a month ago. They were an older couple; L., the husband, was the one we interacted with the most. He was a commercial contractor and drove a big black pickup, but he also made sure to let my wife and me know he had never once voted […]
Last week my family traveled to Oregon for an end-of-summer trip. We wanted to start in Bend, in the central part of the state. There we would hike and explore a bit—somewhat to her dismay, I was especially eager to take my daughter up South Sister, one of the Three Sisters volcanoes—before driving down to […]
A couple of weeks ago I spent a long weekend with my dad in Astoria, the town in Oregon where I grew up. Our visits tend to go like so: On the first day I arrive in the late afternoon and we go for a walk, either at a beach or around the neighborhood. The […]
