On a salmon walk last week, a friend and I encountered this battered, spawned-out chinook in the final hours of his life: his milt spent, flesh ragged and necrotic, preparing to relax into the embrace of death. We watched him swirl aimlessly in this pool for half an hour, in awe of the vibrant spirit […]
Animals
Here’s a picture of something I found and put in my mouth. You get to guess what it is. The season for these where I live is just getting going, and this first ran four years ago, so it’s about time to show it again. First, is it organic or manufactured? Don’t scroll down to […]
A couple of weeks ago, during a backpacking trip in Wyoming’s Wind River Range, Elise and I shared our campsite with a short-tailed weasel. He, or she, was lithe and frolicsome, darting over rocks and flowing around the trunks of lodgepoles in relentless pursuit of squirrels. Weasels have a sort of split reputation — they […]
Sunday morning. Early for a Sunday morning, which is to say not that early. Maybe 8 a.m. A crowd of gulls and terns stood along this sandy Delaware beach. When my friend and I walked past they took off, as expected, and returned to what seemed to be the main activity of the morning: fishing. […]
This week, a mourning dove has started to build a nest in the walnut tree outside my office window. I see it flying back and forth with twigs in its beak, perching on a piece of webbing, waiting for the right moment to swoop in. Why is a mourning dove building a nest in August? […]
In my last post, I extolled the virtues of our BirdCam, a delightful contraption that, this spring, provided a fun little window into the lives of our backyard buntings, orioles, and other winged neighbors. Alas, summer has since arrived, migrants have moved north and upslope, and now BirdCam feeds us a dull diet of House […]
A coyote urine mark I investigated with my nostrils in the snow was lemony and oceanic with an aftertaste of burning sulfur and fetid saltwater. A healthy piss from a black bear in the sand I’d call oak barrel stank. I got my nose as close as I dared into the stained hole from the […]
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 as raucous as a […]