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 […]
Animals
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 […]
I first wrote about abalone in 2012, and thing are looking even worse than they did at the time. The abalone sport fishery in California has been closed until 2021. Researchers and abalone divers are starting to remove sea urchin, which have taken over the abalone’s habitat and munched away at kelp forests. Hopefully the […]
Squirrels are comforted by birds’ easy chit-chat, new research tells us. Biologists already knew the scurrying rodents tuned into birds’ alarm calls, but they didn’t realize that the mammals responded to songs about the good times, too. Content chirps suggest to squirrels that all is well. To me, too. At this time of year especially […]
My fish died last week. I am not sure how long he lay on the bottom of his aquarium before I noticed. It wouldn’t have been more than a day, because I’d checked on him the previous afternoon. He wasn’t looking good, unmoving except for his gills, which seemed to be straining. But then Percy […]
May I ask a favor? If you spot a spider web today, avoid barreling through it and take the time to look it over. Crouch down, really examine it. Imagine the making of it, that Sisyphean task that the web builders face day after day. Say hello to the spider—she’s around there somewhere, hiding off […]