June 8, 2012, Cedaredge Colorado—It was an ordinary Friday afternoon. I was at my desk writing when I looked out the window and saw an enormous plume of smoke billowing from the back of our property. It was the kind of moment when you’re supposed to remain calm and remember all the wise things you […]
Nature
This is the second installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read my first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here. At dawn on June 6, more than 30 years after Lynn was chasing tortoises at the top of Alcedo, our boat anchored near the volcano’s base in Urbina Bay. By […]
Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming […]
I first encountered lionfish on Carrie Bow Cay, a hurricane-battered scrap of an island 15 miles off the coast of Belize. The rotating crew of biologists on Carrie Bow work hard and play hard, and one popular form of play is lionfish hunting: spearing, cooking, and enthusiastically devouring these stripey fellows on the left. Lionfish […]
My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked like a shiny stick. I leaned in for a closer look and realized I was looking at a long, fat worm. “Is this a worm?” I asked my husband. (I like to ask questions […]
Single White Abalone: female, 7, seeks male. Too bad we’re not hermaphroditic like terrestrial gastropods, or I wouldn’t have to be so picky. Likes: rocky substrate, algae. Looking for a mate who lives within three to five meters. Long-distance just doesn’t work for me. The white abalone, the first marine invertebrate to make the federal […]
My parents own roughly 100 acres of land smack dab in the heart of Wisconsin’s driftless area, a portion of the state left largely untouched by glaciers. When I was in high school, we built a cabin on that land. I remember weekends spent sawing two-by-fours and pouring cement. And when we couldn’t stand to […]
I have been hearing about Sunday’s annular eclipse for weeks. Earlier this month, I visited my parents in Albuquerque, and the eclipse was all my dad could talk about. Dad, known to the rest of the world as Dee Friesen, is President of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society (TAAS) and when I arrived at his house […]
