For a recent edition of Smithsonian Magazine, I wrote a retrospective on the life and career of Marie Fish — ichthyologist, bioacoustician, and epitome of nominative determinism. Fish spent decades recording marine animals in her laboratory and at sea, and revealed that, far from being the “silent world” described by Jacques Cousteau, the ocean was as raucous as a […]
Animals
Over the last few months, I’ve grown convinced that the single most effective tool for the conversion of new birders is the board game Wingspan. This winter some friends and I became obsessed with Elizabeth Hargrave’s invention, a gorgeously designed and illustrated engine-building game that basically requires its players to assemble an aviary of western […]
I first met Our Jenny in 2010 (I think?), when I walked into her office at National Geographic to buy a lizard. It’s a cute story; we’ll tell it some other time. For now, all you need to know is that the reptile sale turned into a friendship, and then a collaboration, as I helped […]
This past weekend, during a tracking course in California (spoiler: I did not ace the final exam), we students were tasked with identifying the above gorgeous creature, found dead by our instructors on — where else? — the highway. This gorgeous little beast is a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a lithe, furtive carnivore that I’d […]
Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles. But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished. Killer whales – or orcas if you prefer, or […]
Long before I knew that science writing could be a job, I wrote science poems. A lot of them. Sometimes several in a day. And just as quickly, I abandoned them and moved on to the next vivid factoid in astronomy, anatomy, or animal behavior. There are hundreds of these dashed-off verses in my files, […]
First light on Jewel Key found the tide out and the raccoons hungry. I followed one along the exposed tidal flat that rimmed the south edge of this Everglades islet, Chokoloskee Bay at our backs, the glittering expanse of the Gulf of Mexico before us. The raccoon, or her ancestors, had come here under her […]
We, the People of LWON, write whatever the f*** we want. But on days when we just can’t, we rerun an old post. Today, I just can’t. And yet rerunning old posts is against my personal religion. So today I am excavating the blog post that I partially wrote in the summer of 2021 and […]