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 […]
ben goldfarb
Last month I had occasion to spend a couple of days poking around beaver ponds with Joe Wheaton, a castorologist at Utah State University. Joe is a visionary thinker and a profound observer of aquatic ecosystems, and I learn something new whenever I hang out with him. My latest trip to Utah didn’t disappoint, and […]
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 […]
Two weeks ago, late to the zeitgeist as ever, I watched My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary about a relationship between a human and a cephalopod. Probably you’ve seen it (and if not, you should!), but, in brief, it’s about the yearlong friendship filmmaker Craig Foster strikes up with a female common octopus who lives […]
The other day, my friend Max — a brilliant aquatic scientist whose work lies at the center of the herpetology/gender studies Venn diagram — tweeted a comment he’d received from an anonymous peer reviewer. Evidently this reviewer had doubted Max’s claim that frogs have political economic histories. Max’s reply: “lolz yes. All critters on Earth […]
For a recent edition of Smithsonian Magazine, I wrote a retrospective on the life and career of Marie Fish — ichthyologist, bioacoustician, and epitome of nominative determinism. Fish spent decades recording marine animals in her laboratory and at sea, and revealed that, far from being the “silent world” described by Jacques Cousteau, the ocean was […]
Among the many rewarding aspects of my well-documented beaver obsession is this: it makes for interesting road trips. Roads tend to follow water, which means that you stand good odds of encountering Castor canadensis and its works during any long drive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve screeched to a halt on a […]
This time last year Elise and I were bellied up to a bar (remember those?) in Montana, talking about what childless dog-owning couples generally talk about: our pet. We’d owned Kit — or had she owned us? — for a year and change at that point, and we’d taught her the basics: to sit, to […]