Hello friends, how are you holding up? Can I give you a hug? The world is burning, literally, and figuratively, but we can’t give in to despair. The shock and awe strategy we’ve been living through this last month is disorienting, infuriating and disheartening, but that’s the point. The people leading this assault on science and […]
Miscellaneous
I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]
This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI. Little fingers swipe and […]
Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars. So I do what I often do when […]
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 […]
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 […]
