My wife and I were hiking up a pain in the ass desert canyon the other day, hand over hand between bus-sized boulders, no trail to follow, when she said she was done and sat in the shade. She said feel free to poke ahead and when I did, within eyesight of her I found […]
Animals
Tomorrow is international jumping spider day, so I’m taking this as an excuse to tell you about one my favorite jumping spiders, Habronattus pyrrithrix. I was introduced to the species while writing a story about the perceptual world of jumping spiders for Science News. I interviewed visual ecologist Nate Morehouse at the University of Cincinnati. […]
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 […]
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 […]
