The Ramsay family has lived at the Bamff estate, 1300 acres of heathery hills and woodlands in eastern Scotland, for nearly eight centuries. Today, environmentalists Paul and Louise Ramsay share the property with three families of beavers. The couple brought the animals to Bamff in 2002 as part of a controversial effort to reintroduce European […]
Nature
Late last year, during a reporting trip in Cambodia, I shared a car for a couple of days with Simon Mahood, a British ornithologist who works for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Phnom Penh. Mahood, a devoted birdwatcher since childhood, was full of stories about the rare birds and remote places of Southeast Asia. But […]
Earlier this week, I had the privilege of spending a few days at a place that nurtured my interest in science. The Mountain Research Station was where I conducted my first independent research project (funded by an REU grant from the NSF). As I’ve written previously, my experience studying the evolution of an alpine plant’s […]
One night in May, I idly watched a scene from a rerun of an Animal Planet show called Mermaids: The Body Found. An affable-looking biomechanics researcher named Stephen Pearsall was recounting an analysis of a mysterious marine mammal carcass. In what appeared to be a dramatic re-enactment, the camera zoomed in on torn animal tissue, […]
On Sunday evening, I was standing in our orchard watching the sunset when I turned around and saw a strange beam of light that appeared to rise from the east, directly opposite the setting sun. Crepuscular rays or “God’s Fingers” are pretty common around here, but usually these majestic light rays emanate from the sun. […]
Right now, the butterfly might be coming out. Or it might not. On Thursday, my son’s preschool teacher said that Friday would be the day. On Friday, she said she hoped it would wait until Monday. She and the kids have been marking off the days since the monarch caterpillar stopped munching milkweed and spun […]
It’s after Memorial Day, so I should be wearing white instead of thinking about the white stuff. (Although if I were in the Arctic Circle or even in Vermont and New York, where a late-May storm dropped a foot or more in some spots, I might be thinking about snow quite a bit). Even when […]
Last year, I reported a story about sharks disappearing in the Sea of Cortez. The story deals with one little spot near the bottom of the Baja Peninsula called El Bajo. El Bajo is famous for two things, I suppose. One, it’s the site where scientists discovered a now-famous behavior in which hammerhead sharks from […]
