I set down my pen next to a slug the other day, not your garden variety, but a beast of a banana slug near the central California coast under misty morning redwoods. The slug wasn’t so much lumbering as gliding at a hardly perceptible speed over dried leaves, under twigs. Setting the pen down, I […]
Nature
We have been going out to see the comet—to try to see the comet, that is—almost every night for the past week. I read articles to figure out where to find it, beneath the Big Dipper after sunset. Most of the articles call it a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and it’s true. Comet NEOWISE won’t be back […]
To be fair, the blue jay did warn me. I was walking across a green space near my apartment building, bounded by streets and a transit station and criss-crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by roads. A recent mow–the first in months–had left it looking like a hay field. A hay field with a lot […]
When one of the founders of conservation biology passed this week at 84, I heard it was peaceful, that he was ready. I imagine Michael Soulé’s heart and breath stopping and an incredible release of feathers and bones, colors of a million beetles, a rush of eyes of countless shapes. You might say he ushered […]
Since I published a book about beavers two years ago, I’ve heard from dozens, maybe hundreds, of readers with their own beaver experiences to share. This is a wonderful perk of authorhood: When you tell your own story, you attract others. I’ve gotten emails from folks who have hand-fed blackberries to wild beavers, who have […]
A big black bird was perched up on the corner of a house, one of the nice, big old houses in my neighborhood. “Nice,” “big,” and “old” is about as precise as I can get on architecture. But I can nail down that bird. It was an American crow. It called, a single caw! Its […]
In March, when the boys and I started walking at the beach every morning, I decided I would re-learn the names of shorebirds. Not the gulls—even the professor who originally taught me the names of shorebirds said not to worry too much about gulls. But the other ones, the ones with the w’s in their […]
A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet. Natural inks have been enjoying […]