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 […]
Animals
My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a […]
The end of the year is a time for lists. Our Ten Favorite Books, Twelve Movies We Loved, Twenty-Seven TikToks that Perfectly Captured the National Mood in 2022. We’re a society obsessed with rankings — with the quantification of media, the comparison of culture, the litanization of everything. We writers are the worst of the […]
This is Part II of my heart-filling conversation with Sabrina Imbler (they/them), a poet, essayist, science writer, and author of the forthcoming collection HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. If you missed Part I last month, you can read it here. Kate: What was the fact-checking process like for this […]
Last month I went to Arizona on a reporting trip. One afternoon excursion took me to the eastern Patagonia Mountains, the rolling dun-colored range that aligns with one segment of the United States’ border with Mexico. I walked through oak-juniper woodlands alive with gray foxes and Coues deer, a small, desert-adapted subspecies of whitetail. Tufty […]
After a long, miserable summer of illness, I’m back, and I’ve got something extra-marvelous to share: an interview with Sabrina Imbler (they/them), a fellow poet/essayist/science writer and the author of the forthcoming collection HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. Our conversation about writing, publishing, and (what else?) marine invertebrates was […]
This concerns the burned out hulk of a ponderosa pine that bears have taken an interest in, sculpted, really. I recently saw this smoldered-black tree on a backpack with two friends in Western Colorado. The walk took four days with no human trails to speak of, so when we arrived, we were well away from […]