I love to count, and as a student of ecology I have counted many things over the years: sandpipers, whales, ducks, deer mice, penguins, internodes on eelgrass rhizomes, to name just a few. In part I love counting’s essential mundanity. It is so central to any ecological question, but my god can it be boring. […]
Animals
A version of this poem appeared in Doubleback Review. The Death of the Lobster I. The death of the lobster will commence quietly. One night, she will awake and find her shell slightly too snug: The lobster’s shell has stopped growing. The lobster has not. Tomorrow, her shell will be tighter; the next day, tighter […]
I’ve spent a lot more time in a car than I used to, since the pandemic started. Because of not wanting to be in spaces where other people are exhaling. On Sunday, I spent a few half-hour stretches in a car. And I noticed a number of things, and I’m here to tell you about […]
Last week I asked a friend, new to town, to meet me on the corner by Mockingbird Lane. I have been noticing mockingbirds more since the start of the pandemic—the bright flash of white tail feathers, the snippets of stolen songs. And I’d been to this corner many times—it’s the start of one of my […]
The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubted Max’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth […]
If you study the breeding habits of a stout gray seabird called the rhinoceros auklet on a couple of islands in Washington, a field season typically lasts from May until August. Come fall, then, you have a choice: you can either dive into the data and analysis and statistical whatnot, or you can spend some […]
In regard to the wildness of birds towards man, there is no other way of accounting for it… many individuals… have been pursued and injured by man, but yet have not learned a salutary dread of him. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species Darwin’s Finches All right, fine, the first few birds Could not […]
As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping: One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall […]