Late at night, after the campers at Puddingstone Lake RV park in Los Angeles County have gone to bed, Ted Stankowich and his graduate students set up infrared cameras and speakers around an open field. They open cans of cat food and fling chunks of it all over the grass. Then they wait. The skunks come in droves. Some wear metal ear cuffs and RFID tags. Others […]
Miscellaneous
We here at LWON aren’t opposed to a little snark now and then. In our annual homage to SHARK WEEK, we give the gentlest creatures daggers for teeth or in some other way flip them on their funny little heads. We embrace the stinky and dis the adorable. We make stuff up without apology. We […]
There’s a little patch of horror growing along my weekly drive, a strange blossoming on the side of the highway. People can’t stop pulling over for it. Flowers have appeared in profusion, alpine firecrackers of penstemon and some blue-hooded species, maybe an Aconite, wolfsbane, not one I know because they are invasives seeded across a […]
This post originally ran January 5, 2016 In the quarter light of a few remaining bulbs in a decommissioned hall of the Smithsonian, Kirk Johnson, the museum director, pushed back drapes of clear plastic. The National Fossil Halls was being undressed for demolition, dioramas and murals half torn down, everything had to go. In his […]
On the eve of disappearing to the ever-warmer-every-year Bering Sea for a couple of weeks, I thought it a good time to re-post this piece I wrote after my first visit up there, in August, 2017. Each morning, when the fog was thin enough to see, I went to the cliffs. I’d park the white […]
To be a parent is to get jerked around. Toy manufacturers jerk you around into buying useless crap. Other parents jerk you around making you worry you live in the wrong zip code. The kids themselves jerk you around into buying that second scoop of blueberry brontosaurus crunch with rainbow sprinkles. And, of course, Hollywood […]
This post originally appeared May 3, 2018 The Atacama Desert is country that wears quiet like a skin. Stretching through the top 600 miles of Chile, it is so spare of all save earth and rock that it calls to mind bone stripped of flesh by sun, wind, teeth. It is a place that makes […]
This essay originally ran November 11, 2015, and is reappearing here as part of Atacama Week. Rain has been falling on the driest non-polar desert in the world, famous for parts of it not seeing a drop of rain for centuries. The Atacama Desert in South America is caught in the rain shadow of the Andes on one […]
