I Know What the Fox Says

By: | October 22, 2025
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I haven’t heard the foxes for a good year now. The woods are still there but the owners sold it to a buyer who promised to cut down only the middle of it, you know how buyers promise things. No trees have been cut down yet but a lot of people have been tramping through the woods, measuring and discussing. Maybe the foxes got tired of the people, maybe they know what’s coming; but in any case, they probably got up and left. Not everything ends well.

I wrote that paragraph on August 7, 2019, and since then (YES!) things ended well. Only the middle of the woods was indeed cut, and the foxes are back. They sashay across lawns and up the sidewalks. They look neither right nor left, they own the whole neighborhood, but I swear they know every movement everywhere. The 2019 post was a re-run from September 8, 2016. It strikes me that I’ve been doing this for a long time.

*

Across the street are two houses with two small yards, connected so they look like one, shaded by trees, one of which has a rope looped in it. The little kids come out of both houses, run through the shade into the dapple-spots of sunlight, disappear back into the shade, grab the rope and swing, climb up into the tree and perch like little panthers. Sometimes they sing. And one twilight, running into and out of the light, what they sang was “What does the fox say?”

The song was popular a few years ago but I’d never listened to it.  I went inside and googled it.  It’s an unsettlingly weird song by a Norwegian — what is it with those far northerners and their pale skins and light eyes and strange stories? The song is about a guy who knows that dogs say woof and elephants say toot but doesn’t know what the fox says; so a bunch of people dressed in animal costumes dancing in a woods tell him what the fox says, which is, among other things, Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding! Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow! Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff! You get the idea, they’re making it up, they don’t know what the fox says either.  These sounds, coming out of the dark from kids in trees across the street, Fraka-kaka-kaka-kaka-kow!, were also unsettlingly weird.

I didn’t used to know what the fox said either. And that’s odd because I grew up on a small farm set in fields, backing on to woods. That’s prime fox territory. We kept chickens, and foxes would get into the chicken house and kill them. I knew it was foxes because my mother said so. But I never heard a fox.

So decades later, hundreds of miles away, in a city, I woke up one night hearing an unholy scream. It didn’t sound human, it didn’t even sound animal.  I looked out the window and saw a large fox, long tail held out behind, walking slowly down the street, stopping every now and then to lift its head and scream. You have to hear that sound to believe it. It sounded like it came from a time before animals.

That was years ago; the fox lived in a woods behind the houses across the street. I now recognize the sound — it’s been called a vixen scream and every Brit TV show featuring stately country mansions in the night has vixen screams in the background. Foxes live maybe five years, says Google, so that any foxes I hear now are probably its children. The neighbors keep track of them; on summer mornings they say, “Did you hear the fox last night?” For weeks they talked about one large one that limped; I never saw it.  After a while no one saw a limping fox again so either the fox died or it stopped limping.

One night this summer, a neighbor and I were sitting on the porch as it got dark, talking about this and that.  I was in the middle of saying something when she froze and nodded toward the street. There, walking down the middle, through the pools of street lights, was a fox and two cubs, maybe adolescents, all three sticking together.  They might be heading toward the creek at the bottom of the street. They walked out of the dark and into the street lights, appearing, disappearing, reappearing, the way the little kids across the street moved in and out of the light. They slipped under cars, walked back into the street.  Then they walked off into the dark, not saying a word, not saying any of the things that foxes say.

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Photo by Oliver Truckle, via Flickr

Science Vacations Are the Best Vacations

By: | October 20, 2025
Every rock you pick up at the Mount Stephen Trilobite Beds has a trilobite on it.

Science vacations are the best vacations. I’ve been ridiculously fortunate to visit some great science-related destinations, and I’m trying to figure out which ones to visit next. I’ll share some of my recommendations here, in no particular order. I hope you’ll share your favorites with me and the rest of the Last Word on Nothing community. 

A science vacation, for me, means anywhere with interesting wildlife, plants, fossils, rock formations, caves, mountains, museums, reefs, astronomical observatories, engineering marvels, science history sites, etc. Any destination can be a science destination if you look at it right. 

Going to the Galápagos is like a pilgrimage for non-believers. (Believers are welcome, too.) I had studied plenty of evolutionary biology—you probably have, too—but when you go there and see the finches and the tortoises and tree-like cacti and the fearless mockingbirds and how they interact and co-evolve on different islands, it just makes all of Earth’s living history make sense. You can swim with marine iguanas, see penguins and flamingos on the same coast, visit HMS Beagle landing sites, and laugh at boobies dancing and frigatebirds puffing out their throat pouches. 

Mount St. Helens erupted 45 years ago (I know, I know, I had to double-check the math) and you can still see the devastation it caused—and the ecosystem’s recovery. Any volcanic park makes for a great science trip, as long as it’s inactive or you’re at a safe distance. Lassen Volcanic National Park in California, Haleakalā in Hawaii, and Mount Rainier in Washington are all relatively young, accessible, ridiculously dramatic volcanoes. Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (the one in Close Encounters) is the core of an ancient volcano. You can walk through lava tubes at Craters of the Moon in Idaho (bring a headlamp). 

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Screaming Parties

By: | October 17, 2025

Ben has since left The Last Word on Nothing but he left this memento of himself, for which we are grateful.

Earlier this month I visited Portugal for the first time, where I found much to love: the vertiginous cliffs overlooking the Nazaré beach, the ubiquitous custard tarts and dessert wines, the labyrinth of secret passages that veins Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. Uncultured nature-loving heathen that I am, however, I found myself most drawn to the country’s wildlife — namely, to its swifts.

The common swifts, Apus apus, gathered each evening above Lisbon’s streets and squares, sharp black chevrons silhouetted against purpling sky, the very picture of grace and velocity. They rocketed down alleys and wheeled past balconies, accelerating into turns so steep and sudden they would have made Maverick pass out. All the while they shrieked at each other, shrill and raucous — a nightly production of avian cacophony called, perfectly, a “screaming party.” And then, though I never quite saw them do it, they disappeared into the heavens, an ascension known, for its synchronicity with evening prayers, as a “vesper flight.” (The first rule of swifts is that their every behavior must have an odd and charming name.)

“Vesper Flights” is, not coincidentally, the title of an essay collection by the estimable British nature writer Helen Macdonald; the book bears a swift, outstretched and eye glittering, on its cover. In the titular piece, Macdonald explicates the mind-blowing biology of swifts, virtuosic flyers who, after fledging, can go two years without touching earth. Each night, swifts fly as high as six thousand feet to sleep on the wing — a fact discovered by a World War I-era French aviator who blundered into a flock deep in slumber, “miniature black stars illuminated by the reflected light of the moon.” But they don’t just climb to such great heights to snooze: They also feel the rush of high-altitude air flows and so forecast incoming weather systems, and calibrate their internal magnetic compasses against stars and polarized light. “They’re quietly, perfectly, orienting themselves,” Macdonald writes.

Although I certainly consider myself a Macdonald fan — like everyone who read it, I’ve fantasized about living with a goshawk since devouring H Is for Hawk — I confess that I didn’t initially adore Vesper Flights. Its short essays felt fragmentary and fleeting; many ended abruptly just as they began to build momentum. And its swift meditation, however remarkable its facts, left me a little cold. Swifts, Macdonald wrote, had become her “fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions” in the face of COVID and other tumult. This seemed like a lot of metaphorical weight to pile on her avian subject: Wasn’t the astonishing natural history enough? Couldn’t swifts just be, you know, birds?

When I was in Portugal, I pulled up Macdonald’s essay again, nearly three years after I’d first read it in the New York Times Magazine, to refresh myself on the basics of swifthood. My experience of the piece was transformed; indeed, it struck me as one of the loveliest works of nature writing I’d ever encountered. Having never experienced flesh-and-blood swifts before, I’d failed to appreciate how perfectly Macdonald had evoked them. (The observation that “their surfing and tacking against the pressures of oncoming air make visible the movings of the atmosphere” struck me as especially apt, in how it captured their oneness with the sky, these creatures who never land.) 

And, too, swifts were so charismatic that of course they made sense as parables and spiritual guides; you could hardly observe such bewitching birds without feeling connected to them (not least because they operate in cities, fundamentally human spaces; they both belong to our world and exist apart from it). Reading about swifts in Portugal was like, I don’t know, reading Joyce in Dublin: The work helps you appreciate the place, sure, but the place also helps you appreciate the work, that magical transubstantiation of setting and literature.

I returned from Portugal with a ceramic swift — the kind of tchotchke that I virtually never get on vacation, but that seemed the perfect remembrance of our trip. My swift is inert, incapable of screaming parties or vesper flights or any of the other behaviors that make these animals extraordinary. Yet in the graceful sweep of its molded wings, it nonetheless captures something of its species’ dynamism and speed; it does in porcelain the work that “Vesper Flights” performs in prose.

ROAM: an interview with Hillary Rosner

By: | October 15, 2025

Hillary Rosner is a science journalist and editor who teaches journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is also a friend and fellow member of Scilance, a network of 30+ science writers that has been meeting up online for 20 years. Over the years, I’ve loved following Hillary’s thoughtful, adventurous reporting on wildlife conservation, whether she’s writing about orangutans in Borneo or the Devils Hole pupfish in the Mojave Desert. Now, she’s written a wonderful book, which was published yesterday by Patagonia. It’s called Roam: Wild Animals and the Race to Repair Our Fractured World.

In Roam, Hillary writes about conversation projects around the world that are studying how wild creatures move across landscapes and working to support species by reconnecting fragmented habitat. I was lucky enough to talk with Hillary last week. Here’s our (lightly edited) conversation about Roam.

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The Black Locust

By: | October 13, 2025

Our neighbors of ten years moved away about a month ago. They were an older couple; L., the husband, was the one we interacted with the most. He was a commercial contractor and drove a big black pickup, but he also made sure to let my wife and me know he had never once voted for Trump. This is Seattle, after all.

As neighbors we were friendly but not overly so. (Again, Seattle.) L. was jocular in a Hail-Fellow-Well-Met kind of way, and we enjoyed occasional chitchat over our shared fence. Once when that fence needed to be replaced, L. was able to leverage his contacts and get us all a discount. For that I was grateful.

This placid cordialness would have been the defining feature of our relationship but for an incident a couple of years ago. One spring afternoon I was doing some yard work when L. came outside and leaned over the fence. “Hey, Eric, got a question for ya,” he said. “What do you think of your tree here?” He gestured to the tree I was at that moment standing under.

I looked up and considered the tree. It was about forty feet tall. Thin. Small green leaves and white blossoms bedecked its branches.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s nice enough.”

L. nodded. “Have you ever thought about cutting it down?”

I smile-grimaced in a way I do when I’m not sure how to respond. “Have I thought about cutting it down?” I said. “No. Why?”

L. explained his thinking. After the tree was done blossoming, its petals fluttered down into his backyard. They were a pain to sweep up. They also had a powerful fragrance, and his wife did not like the way they smelled. So if I didn’t have strong feelings about the tree, it wouldn’t be a huge deal just to, you know, get rid of it.

“Think about it,” he said, and went back inside.

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Did You Know

By: | October 10, 2025

The Moon is closer during a supermoon and you will be able to tell, because it looks so much bigger and brighter, but your photos of it will still suck.
You can still send me the photos you took, and I will appreciate them, as well as appreciate that you thought of me when you saw the Moon. No, I am not tired of talking about it.

It is a long road that has no turning.

If you hit glue three Lego bricks along the side of your desk, and then attach three Lego mini figures on them, they can hold your charging cords and you can have Darth Vader or whoever holding your iPhone charger. This will be so much more work than just letting the chargers fall to the floor, and you will need to make a video about it to put on Instagram so you can tell people about it and hope to justify the time and effort you expended. It will not be worth it.

You don’t need a bread basket. You can just put your bread in the pantry, with the peanut butter and other ingredients. It will be ok.

If you buy a seasonal bath mat your kids picked out, the citrus fruits motif with the phrase “welcome summer” will feel weird by the end of September.

Enough is as good as a feast.

If you add a bunch of unnecessary stuff to your Amazon cart, you can check the prices each morning instead of reading the headlines, and feel a little better but somehow also a little worse about the course of your day.

The sun is important to your wellbeing. You should do whatever you can to see it as often as possible, and ideally to feel it on your skin at least once a day. This is hard to achieve when you are sad, but it is even more important then.

Health is better than wealth.

If you go for a walk, you will feel better, but you will not feel the truth of this until after the walk has begun. The improved mood that results from a walk can happen or not happen depending on whether you are wearing your shoes. This superposition of emotional states is a fact of quantum physics.

The road to hell is paved with slick grease sold by absolutely idiotic ill-intentioned liars, and many things are sliding down it, even now, but we have ways to stop this slide, which not enough of us are using. We must stop the paving and slickening of the road to hell by using every tool and skill at our disposal.

Vaccines prevent communicable diseases.

No matter how long the day, the evening comes.

–

Image: Supermoon over the Sangre de Cristo Range, Wikimedia Commons

The Stubborness of Women

By: | October 8, 2025

This post first appeared in November 2023.

For reasons I didn’t fully understand myself (marriage? the cat? surely someone or something else was to blame), I was feeling more than usually lazy, or maybe just unwilling to tolerate the discomfort of writing. It felt like a dangerous malaise, and the only remedy I could think of was to try to soak up some other people’s bravery. So a couple of months ago, I asked our Ann for her recommendations of favorite essayists.

She recommended Montaigne: “I haven’t read him in a while but I loved him,” she wrote. “He was so smart and funny and open.” I trundled off to a used bookstore and picked up a copy of The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. I’m only about three quarters of the way through the book, but I’ve been taking notes and sending them to Ann as I go. She suggested they might make a decent post, strung together. So, in the provisional spirit of Montaigne, I share them with you, dear LWON readers.

10.29.23

To philosophize is to learn how to die

I read this essay while waiting for a big vegetable lasagna to bake. I was in the middle of Montaigne’s exhaustive list of ways to die (killed by a bump from a pig!) and his instructions to continuously keep death at the forefront of our minds, when the timer beeped.

I went to pull the lasagna out and dumped the whole thing upside down onto the oven door, barely missing my feet. After screaming for help, then scooping the charred noodles back into the dish, I went back to the couch and read the following: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening.” The lasagna looked terrible but tasted great.

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Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

By: | October 6, 2025

Our little farm is nestled in a pinyon juniper habitat that we share with lots of other creatures. Often enough, we encounter these animals close up. Sightings of foxes, coyotes, deer, elk and turkeys are so commonplace as to have become almost (but not quite) uninteresting.

Other creatures we see mostly by the signs they leave behind — paw prints, scat, feathers, fur, or partially eaten prey.  Sometimes they invade our garden, compost pile or orchard. One year, a bear climbed up into a young Honeycrisp tree that was loaded with apples and nearly destroyed it while devouring all the fruit. 

We have a game camera near the back of our property where we can observe creatures coming and going. It’s been a busy summer on the game cam. 

Here’s our neighborhood bear.

A mountain lion has also been hanging around. We’ve been seeing him a lot on the game cam, though never face-to-face (and I’m ok with that).

Oh, and the tigers! Ok, tiger striped cats, but they think they’re tigers. Sometime this summer a mamma cat started hanging around our winery. They were hungry, so I gave in and began feeding her and her five kittens — two black, one gray and two tiger striped tabbies. We have managed to trap all but one of them (still working on it!) to vaccinate and spay or neuter, which I’ve learned is no easy task.