It is me again, trying to learn more about birds. I am trying with my shore birds, I am trying with my old field guides and my new Merlin ID app. And so, when I heard about a class to better identify bird song, I thought I should add one more tool to my feathery […]
Animals
The slow stretch of river where I like to swim gleamed copper yesterday morning, reflecting sunlight tinted red by wildfire smoke. I sat and drank my coffee as the sun rose, watching the silhouette of a hummingbird zip across the dun-colored sky. Four mergansers cruised across the pond then dove underwater, leaving barely a ripple behind them. “Must be nice to be a boat, a plane, and […]
Last weekend Elise and I spent three days backpacking in the vicinity of Pyramid Pass, a high notch in the stony spine of the Idaho Selkirks. With a couple of friends in tow (don’t worry: absolutely no hugging!), we crested the pass and descended to a teacup lake nested in a bowl of granite and […]
I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I […]
We have been going out to see the comet—to try to see the comet, that is—almost every night for the past week. I read articles to figure out where to find it, beneath the Big Dipper after sunset. Most of the articles call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it’s true. Comet NEOWISE won’t be back […]
My latest happy distraction is the candy-stick of a male dragonfly that has taken over my backyard pond. A gorgeous blue dasher, he zips (dashes!) in circles around me, hovers remarkably close to my face like some tiny drone, then finally alights on a twig nearby, watching me—truly watching–with his cartoonishly large compound eyes. His […]
This post originally appeared in February, 2020. I resurrected it because I figure we could all use a dog hug, in this pandemic time of not hugging folks outside our households. When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine […]
It never hurts to celebrate, again, the oddities of life on Earth. Here’s a piece about a discovery reported in 2017 that reminds us of our humble beginnings. Our microscopic relative might have looked like this. The fossil, waaaaay bigger than real life. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Mouth. Anus. Reproductive bit in between. […]