This huge bug hurled itself at me the other day and missed. It landed just to my left, on the wooden deck, and there it stayed—long enough for me to spend a little time admiring it. Alaus oculatus is what it was, and likely still is these few days later, named for its false “eyes.” […]
Animals
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
In March, when the boys and I started walking at the beach every morning, I decided I would re-learn the names of shorebirds. Not the gulls—even the professor who originally taught me the names of shorebirds said not to worry too much about gulls. But the other ones, the ones with the w’s in their […]
I know it’s not Friday, and we don’t really do a lot of penis posts any more. But I felt like with all the uncertainty in the world, I really wanted to revisit this post about alligator penises. It first ran in 2013. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so […]
A partially fictionalized diary of antvasion Sept. 15 Line of small black ants across the kitchen floor. Origin and destination unclear. Some have abdomens cocked upward at a jaunty angle, like ant hotrods. This makes them look more aggressive and hooligany somehow. Gone before noon, as if they had never been. Sept. 16 (Forget about […]
The people around me often have burning questions. (This happens to other People of LWON as well. ) These people are often very upset that I do not know the answer. Why do I not know, for example, exactly what would happen if the center of the earth explodes? Why do I not know how […]
When I return home from a trip, or really from any absence longer than 15 minutes, my dog Taiga greets me with the canine equivalent of pyrotechnics: Leaping, writhing, twirling, lip curling, a quiver full of hyena sounds. Once, after a 13-day visit to Alaska, she reached my face in a single bound from the […]
If there’s any animal that could use a new PR agency, it’s got to be the electric eel. I mean, think about it – what other animal doesn’t even have its own correct name? You’ve probably heard that an electric “eel” is no eel at all but rather a fish (a knifefish, to be exact). From this […]