One morning a week or so ago I was at a park on the north shore of Lake Washington. The park has a long pier, and I was standing on the pier’s end when I heard a harsh shwarrk off in the distance. I perked up, strained my ears. There it was again: Shwarrk! Shwarrk! […]
Miscellaneous
Assateague The waves curl in and lave the shore, drop their cargo of shells and polished glass, then withdraw, clawing back the sand. Sanderlings scatter, poke and pick, flee incoming waves, chase them back out, reverse, repeat. I stand on spongy sand, solid enough if a bit shaky, sea foam washing my feet. Somewhere to […]
It’s been over half century since researchers dreamt up the idea that grandmothers exist chiefly to enable their children to have their own children, thereby increasing the genetic fitness of the family lineage. In the 1980s, Kristen Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, bolstered this so-called “grandmother hypothesis” with her studies of the Hadza […]
It’s been 15 years since my one and only contribution to the Confluence Project, an achievement I savour to this day. The goal of the online repository is ambitious, but seemingly simple: to store photos—and perhaps a little travel story—from the intersection of every integer degree of longitude and latitude in the world. So far, […]
This post first ran in July 2019. In 2015, Sarah Grimes picked up this river otter’s carcass on a rugged beach covered in tumbled sea glass. She removed its skin and flesh and soaked its bones first in warm water, then Borax. She kept each section of the skeleton — legs, paws, spine – in […]
This post originally appeared on April 15, 2020. I’m republishing it today because 1) I’m deep into editing a book that includes a chapter on Wyoming’s mammal migrations, so mobile elk are top of mind; and 2) bands of elk have begun wandering through the fields near my house in Colorado. I’m not sure where […]
this post originally appeared April 30, 2021 First snowmelt, and a month of dry, but the rain finally comes, and everything is flowers, for a time. Categorized in: Miscellaneous
ingredients: good friends you trust a list of things you need permission for time, space snot bandana and/or tissues (optional but recommended) instructions: gather share and explain your list of things you need permission for friends give you permission: i hereby give you permission to…. give permission to self: i give myself permission to…. cry […]