My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and […]
Miscellaneous
This post first ran last January, but it’s just as relevant now. Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series of vignettes about the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if […]
With California once again burning, I keep wondering, if those fires were coming our way, what would I save? I remember my cousin who, years ago, lost her house during a summer of flames; she’d been away from home when it burned, so there was no frantic effort to stuff the car with keepsakes. After […]
I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with […]
I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with […]
I wrote this post in 2019, when I was feeling prickly and uncertain–not too different than how I’m feeling these days. We do have a few more orchids now, although I still am not quite sure how to care for them. * I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly […]
Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and […]
Key:* = Pretty darn sure** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.* This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who […]