Earlier this month, Elise and I traveled to the Osa Peninsula, the appendage of tropical forest that juts off southwest Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. We chose that part of the country primarily to visit Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile protected area that the National Geographic Society once described, curiously, as the “most biologically […]
Nature
Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty Introduction A good […]
Last week on my podcast, my co-host and bestie Rosemerry asked me the last time I’d experienced awe. The honest truth was, I experience it almost every evening this time of year. For reasons that I’ll explain shortly, winter sunsets are the best sunsets. They are very often awe-inducing, and that means that they’re good […]
I’m on an email listserv for people who study bees. Not honeybees (goodness, no, not honeybees). All the other bees. There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world. Tiny metallic green ones, big fuzzy ones, and everything in between. I rarely read the emails – it’s more fun to imagine what they might […]
It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling […]
My wife pieced together a kill in our driveway, sending me pictures of deer tracks posed in a casual walk followed by a sprawl, deer fur in the snow, and faint signs of melt, a couple hours old at most. The next picture was of cat tracks the size of an adult human palm, a […]
Two canyons loom large in my life right now, and have for the past year and a half. This is not a metaphor for something, although maybe it could be. One canyon I visit on purpose, for joyful hikes with my baby, my older daughter, and sometimes a friend or two. The other canyon is, […]