First, if you please, a moment of silence for the thylacine. The Tasmanian tiger, last seen in the wild in 1930, was once Tasmania’s top predator, snacking on possums, wallabies, and the unlucky Tasmanian emu. (Despite persistent rumors, the thylacine did not drink blood. Sorry.) When European settlers arrived, bringing feral dogs, habitat destruction and […]
Nature
A few months ago, I got my dream assignment. Well, okay, it wasn’t really an assignment – I cajoled an editor into letting me write about Cancun’s famous underwater museum, Museo Subacuatico de Arte, or MUSA. The idea isn’t really new – put some stuff underwater that fish like to hide under and watch as […]
Tomorrow, I’m driving to Oregon for a friend’s wedding. While I’m there, I may get a chance to witness what has been described as an “avian tornado”: thousands of Vaux’s swifts dive-bombing a chimney at a Portland elementary school. A Vaux’s swift is a petite, grayish bird with sharp swooping wings and a stubby tail. […]
My studies and work in science were limited to the physical until last year, staying far away from those messy life sciences. When I started studying science illustration, a field which has traditionally accompanied biology, it became clear that nausea was something I had better put aside fast. In fact one could consider my year […]
This summer, I became slightly obsessed with the Ring. Not the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not the Japanese horror movie (which I have vowed never to see), but the epic four-opera series by Richard Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen spans about 17 hours and features a cast of gods, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and a dragon, all […]
Last weekend I heard a story I won’t soon forget. Bob Freer, who runs an animal rescue shelter in the Everglades, appeared on a rerun of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and he began to talk about Florida’s python problem. Of course, I knew Florida had a python problem. But there’s knowing, and then there’s […]
In the Southern summer of 2004, my then-girlfriend and I were camped in a shelter near a rock climbing area in New Zealand called Flock Hill. It was a gorgeous landscape, sweeping grassy hills made famous as Rohan in the “Lord of the Rings” and glacial erratics from the final battle scene in “The Lion, […]
It’s small, it’s fuzzy, and it hurts like hell. Variously known as the “cow killer,” “mule killer,” and “motherf-ing thing that just stung me,” the velvet ant packs more pain per pound than the meanest great white. Don Manley, a professor emeritus of entomology at Clemson University, recalls his run-in with Dasymutilla sp. as the worst […]
