This post originally appeared March 10, 2017. Enjoy! In the summer of 2011, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History was in the process of doing some bug relocation. Specifically, they were moving some of their beetles from the museum building downtown out to a storage facility in the suburbs—specifically, the non-plant-eating scarabs. It was […]
Nature
“When one is alone and lonely, the body gladly lingers in the wind or the rain, or splashes into the cold river, or pushes through the ice-crusted snow. Anything that touches.” –Mary Oliver, “Leaves and blossoms along the way: A poem” It was 95 degrees out on the day I drove towards the wildfire. I […]
Whales are great. You can get a bunch of people who you thought were grumpy and walking by themselves along the sidewalk, and suddenly there’s a whale and you are all shouting and grinning at each other and most of the people have even hung up their phones or stopped texting or tweeting about how […]
There are approximately 50 American robins in my front yard, a noisy, colorful flock centered around my crabapple tree. They have been partying for at least 24 hours, gorging themselves on the fruit and singling lustily. These festive aggregations are a common feature of spring throughout the United States as the birds migrate. Robins are […]
At 10:20 last Monday morning I sat at a table outside of Tucson, Arizona, writing these words: The land does not move, frozen to our eyes. Within a minute or two, a small but notable earthquake struck outside of the almost-ghost town of Bedrock, Colorado, 600 miles away. It was 4.5 on the Richter scale. […]
When, awake one day, the air feels different. Warmer, maybe, dirt wicking up through snow. And blood from some coyote kill tunneling down on the sharpness of its departing heat.
There is a hyper-intelligent mammal in the oceans with whom we might communicate if only we were a more empathetic and patient species. This is the unspoken assumption behind most coverage I see of dolphins. But since 2013, when I read the book reviewed below, I view those ideas in a completely different light. One […]
Until last week, I’d never heard of the Broomway. Now I long to walk it. The Broomway is a paradox: a path through the ocean, a six-century-old walkway that disappears each day. It begins on the southeastern coast of England and heads straight out to sea, crossing about three miles of sand and mudflats until […]
