I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever […]
Animals
In late August 2018 I traveled to the northernmost island in Canada to observe white wolves. These were an extremely unusual group of animals, and they had the distinction of being unafraid of humans. This alone was something, but beyond their fearlessness lay a subtler behavior that is perhaps best described as tolerance. Another way […]
I think about jumping spiders a lot. If you have had a conversation with me in the last several years that lasted more than 5 minutes, you already know this. But what are the spiders thinking? A friend once bought me a mug with a spider on it that reads “Sometimes I wonder if jumping […]
I’m writing a book about mountain lions and it’s down to weeks, days, pages flying, margins scratched and scribbled, when news comes of a 46-year-old woman killed by such a cat a couple hundred miles from where I live. She’d been hiking alone on New Year’s Day, forensics consistent with a mountain lion attack, asphyxiation […]
I had an ephiphany about why cats are the way they are. But before I can explain the epiphany, I should explain the way that cats are. Granted, I don’t have a cat, but I was raised with them. I lived on a small farm and farms have cats to keep the mice and rats […]
Autumn always makes the woods feel emptyThough I know strictly speakingThis isn’t true Bears prowl orchardsChuff through oak grovesStuff themselves before a slumberThat grows shorter every yearDeer, too, are bolder now and dumberHaunting the edges of highwaysRunning to or from the rutEven many insects remainHidden in soil or bark Unnamed under leavesOr within the spongy […]
Because I’m traveling today, to the annual science writers’ conference, I’ve taken the unusual step of running a guest post without clearing it with the rest of the LWON team. My sweet baby Chihuahua mix T.S. Eliot Nestor (pictured above) asked to respond to Our Jenny’s post this week (Little Dog Big Heart), in which […]
