The invasion is now in full swing. I am not sure if I’ll make it beyond tonight. You have no idea what I’ve seen out there. It began a few nights ago, though it was chilly then. The earth gleamed with moisture. There were fewer of them; the cold and the rain held them off, […]
Animals
A long time ago I wrote a poem about change: how necessary it is, and how excruciating it can be. How it comes on its own timeline, whether we want it or not. Writing the first draft of this poem took years, and, appropriately, the poem has never stopped evolving. There will likely never be […]
For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have. But first: her story. […]
Ravens do not generally hang around in my neighborhood, here in northwest Washington, D.C. The common raven lives in a lot of places – much of Europe and Asia; most of Canada, the western U.S. and Mexico; south into Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Common Raven […]
Earlier this month, Elise and I traveled to the Osa Peninsula, the appendage of tropical forest that juts off southwest Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. We chose that part of the country primarily to visit Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile protected area that the National Geographic Society once described, curiously, as the “most biologically […]
Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty Introduction A good […]