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 […]
Nature
Last week on my podcast, my co-host and bestie Rosemerry asked me the last time I’d experienced awe. The honest truth was, I experience it almost every evening this time of year. For reasons that I’ll explain shortly, winter sunsets are the best sunsets. They are very often awe-inducing, and that means that they’re good […]
I’m on an email listserv for people who study bees. Not honeybees (goodness, no, not honeybees). All the other bees. There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world. Tiny metallic green ones, big fuzzy ones, and everything in between. I rarely read the emails – it’s more fun to imagine what they might […]
It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling […]
Two canyons loom large in my life right now, and have for the past year and a half. This is not a metaphor for something, although maybe it could be. One canyon I visit on purpose, for joyful hikes with my baby, my older daughter, and sometimes a friend or two. The other canyon is, […]
Before they head south for the winter, sandhill cranes like to get together and fatten up. One of the places they do this is near the town of Jackson, Michigan. So on a recent visit to Ann Arbor, my dad and I drove over one day to look for them. They weren’t hard to find; […]
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 […]
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 […]
