If you really squint at a map and spin up your full kindergarten imagination, Great Britain looks like a little cartoon dinosaur roaring at Europe, its tail pointing back across the Atlantic ocean. Zoom in on the tip of that squat tail: this is Cornwall, home of clotted cream and dramatic coastal walks. Right at […]
Animals
This post came out a few years ago exploring anxiety and big, wild cats. At that point, there had been no deaths this century from mountain lions in Colorado where I live. New Year’s Day this year that statistic changed when a woman was attacked while alone on a hiking trail not far from the […]
Innovation is one of those abilities we used to think only humans possessed. But you’ve probably heard about the creative problem solving of New Caledonian crows who are able to build tools by bedding wires to fish food out of holes. Captive orcas have been observed chewing up the dead fish they are fed and […]
We were walking past a line of shorebirds on the harbor’s breakwater when my son stopped me and pointed. “Does that bird only have one leg?” About two dozen black turnstones — I didn’t recognize them at the time, I had to use All About Birds later — faced into the wind, broadside to the […]
Jumping spiders can see as well as house cats — despite being less than 10mm long in most cases. I find this astounding, but people almost never seem as impressed as I think they should be when I tell them this. Perhaps they don’t believe it could be true. It is, though. Scientists have measured […]
Jumping spiders are, I think, generally agreed to be the cutest spider. What makes an animal cute? Especially this representative of one of the most-feared animal groups, the spider? It’s fuzzy, like a teddy bear. It has big eyes, like a baby fox. It holds its pedipalps, those little things that stick out on either […]
Not everything can be awful, right? Not everything can be the worst. Anyway, I have just decided that I refuse to let everything be the worst and to succumb to the idea that no, it is, in fact, the worst. I feel a bit guilty about trying to grasp joy, but what choice does any […]
In April, the sun started rising early enough so that I started walking or running near dawn. Each time I returned, there were people gathered underneath the same cluster of eucalyptus trees in the park and I didn’t ask why. I mean, I wondered why, but people do strange things sometimes. Then, a few weeks […]
