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 […]
Nature
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. […]
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 […]
I don’t actually remember that much about the cicadas’ last visit, in 2004. I remember turning onto my parents’ street and noticing how loud the trees were, filled with chorusing insects. But not much about the bugs themselves. Mostly what I remember is trying to convince bug skeptics that a cool thing was happening. My […]
Early on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, my son and I headed out to hunt for morel mushrooms, which are pretty elusive here in New England. Though I’ve searched for them a bit the past few years, I have never yet found them. But I could see from a steady flow of photos […]
In the city, during the pandemic, sometimes this view is my best look at nature for the day. But isn’t it grand? A lovely sunny tree, a starling. In spring: flowers. In summer: cicadas. Throughout the morning, light catches it in different ways. Sometime in the next few years, a new apartment building will appear […]
