At a biological field station in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona — towering canyons and clear-running creeks — a Stanford scientist attending a poetry workshop volunteered to get up for an evening reading. He’d spent the week studying with poet Sherwin Bitsui in an environmental writing program put on by Orion magazine, using specimen […]
Animals
All characters are fictional and should not be confused with real scientists. I especially ask that no bee researcher take offense. We science writers would shrivel up and die if you stopped talking to us. I sat alone again in the cafeteria again today. Ordered the schnitzel. No one wanted to sit next to me. […]
Re-running this piece as a reminder for all of us to appreciate even our fowl-est friends. (See what I did there?) One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check […]
When the National Museum of Natural History, here in D.C., was planning to demolish their fossil hall and build a new one, they knew they would have to deal with something big: Six huge murals. They’re classics, painted between 1960 and 1974, showing wild assemblages of animals from different points in our planet’s history. The […]
I’ve always been bad at bird songs. My neighbor corrected me on this on Sunday, as we were walking down the alley behind my building, so here’s a more accurate statement: I’ve never put in the work that is required to be really good at bird songs. To really learn bird songs, I think you […]
Dear readers of Last Word on Nothing: This will be my last post for some time, as I need to buckle down and focus on a book I am writing. The book is about the tricky ethics of our relationships with nonhuman animals in a world massively influenced by human activity. I will miss writing […]
A version of this post first ran in 2013. In 2006, a puppy came to live on a small farm in Colorado. His name was Oskar, and he was the runt of the litter. Oskar was a playful little guy, but on one fateful autumn day, he would learn that he was living in the […]
“It’s like a good plague,” read the tweet from one of my NPR station’s editors. Epic floods across the Midwest this summer, which more than one local official referred to as “biblical,” brought a wave of frogs and toads to Missouri. It is hard to overstate how much water inundated my adopted state, and […]