An Inordinate Fondness for Grasshoppers

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 […]

Carcass Cam

This winter, having resolved to become better acquainted with our wild neighbors, I bought a trail camera. We’d been renting a cabin along a creek in the Arkansas Valley, and mink and foxes occasionally scuttled past our sliding backdoor. Who knew what other faunal wonders were traversing the property under cover of darkness? When I […]

A Serendipitous Song-Dog in Yellowstone

On March 1, 2022, Yellowstone National Park celebrated its 150th anniversary. I was privileged to work briefly for the Park Service there after college, and Elise and I make a point of returning every year; our honeymoon even revolved around a backpacking trip up Slough and Pebble Creeks. Until we visited last February to cross-country […]

Some crowd-sourced reflections on E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy

Just before the turn of the new year, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, two of the world’s most celebrated biologists, passed away within a day of each other. That they left the world together felt fitting, given the extraordinary interplay between their work. It was Wilson, after all, who, in a series of mad, ingenious […]

Mystery Treats

This week Elise and I completed one of our lives’ great adventures, the John Muir Trail, the legendary footpath that wends along the granitic spine of California’s Sierra Nevadas. In point of fact it’s more accurate to say that she completed it, walking virtually the entire 200-mile course from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney’s […]

The Semiaquatic Martyrs of East Foster Creek

Among the many rewarding aspects of my well-documented beaver obsession is this: it makes for interesting road trips. Roads tend to follow water, which means that you stand good odds of encountering Castor canadensis and its works during any long drive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screeched to a halt on a […]

The Nudi Is a Creature Odd

The other day I was rifling through a drawer in search of a notebook — I have a filing system best described as “post-tornado” — when my hand touched an old external hard-drive. I plugged it into a USB port, and years of photos, many of which I’d assumed were lost forever, bloomed on my […]