You know I love the 17-year cicadas. I loved when the nymphs were crawling out of the ground. I loved when the adults were blundering about. I loved the wings littered on the ground. I loved the singing from the trees. Now I love seeing the flagging on trees, the latest reminder of the cicadas’ […]
Nature
A butterfly in my kitchen—that’s a surprise. It would have had to flutter up a lot of stairs and down a lot of hallways to get here from outside. I suspect it actually came in with some kale. I think it’s a cabbage white butterfly, a sweet little agricultural pest that arrived on this side […]
Earlier this summer I went on a bee hunt. I’m talking about native bees, not honeybees. In the words of Sam Droege, the guy leading the bee hunt, “If your model of ‘bee’ is the honeybee, you need to forget nearly everything you know about bees.” Droege works at the USGS Native Bee Inventory and […]
This week, at a lake house in Michigan, I kept hearing a sound that made me think of a gull, but wasn’t. At least, I heard it when I didn’t see any gulls. I’d heard that the Merlin bird identification app can now identify birds by sound. So I held my phone up and it […]
We first saw the elk in September. Our route to the Wilder forest passed the Yaquina Bay, and there, between the road and mudflats, was an antler rack we initially mistook for a willow tree. Our neighbor said it was likely that hunters chased them out of the hills. That they were a smart herd. […]
Over the last week I traveled from town to town in southwest Colorado giving stage performances at night, telling stories about being here at the height of summer, tales of drought and wildfires and raging thunderstorms. The moon and stars passed over our open-air venues. I gave the show some science and some mysticism, in […]
They were dark forms scattered up and down the beach. One here, three there, a pair just beyond them. Their larger size distinguished them from the other shorebirds, drawing our attention. “What are they?” my dad asked. “Whimbrels,” I said. We were at Fort Stevens, a few miles outside of Astoria, Oregon, my hometown. My […]
About a month after I was born, billions of Brood X cicadas came out of the ground, mated, then died. Over the next few years, I learned to walk, to read, to count. I began and quit dance lessons, piano lessons, youth orchestra, soccer, basketball, tennis. I made friends and grew apart from them. I […]