Colony: Punta Tombo, Chubut, Argentina Date: 9 November Site: RFID B Nest: 708H Nest type: Burrow, northwest-facing, mid-slope, concealed from above Penguin: Male, toe-tag no. 14113/RFID no. 37189 Device: AX3 accelerometer no. 99290, day three of a five-day deployment Nest Contents: Two eggs Notes: Purpose is to ground truth time-stamped accelerometry data from AX3 with […]
birds
Note: This post is best read on a computer screen, but a phone’ll still work. One day last year, my friend Tonya messaged our group chat with a lovely update: a heron had landed in front of their house to eat a fish. The rest of us were enchanted by the thought of it, but […]
* Text: If You Were Looking for a Sign, This Is It Yesterday was hard. The day before yesterday, hard, too. Somehow, something about today has made it soft. Not the unrelenting blankness of the December sky. Not the pain in my teeth, or my hands, or my aching heart. Not the electric bill. Not […]
Long before I knew that science writing could be a job, I wrote science poems. A lot of them. Sometimes several in a day. And just as quickly, I abandoned them and moved on to the next vivid factoid in astronomy, anatomy, or animal behavior. There are hundreds of these dashed-off verses in my files, […]
My blue jay friends are back, tap-dancing on my balcony to get my attention, peering accusingly through the living room windows until I get up to fetch the peanut dish. There are many, many more blue jay poems in my future. Here’s one from the past. (This post first appeared in March of 2022). Many […]
Last week: kind of a weird one. It was windy, which always makes more than the air feel unsettled. One afternoon a neighbor knocked on the door to say a skunk was stumbling around in the front yard in broad daylight. An hour earlier, one of my kids ran into a pole and went to […]
Many of my poems are not autobiographical, but this one is. I can still remember that moment: the early-morning air, the flash of blue. The pang I felt. In the intervening years I’ve gotten to know blue jays much better as a species and as individuals. I’ve spent endless hours reading about them, watching them, […]
If you study the breeding habits of a stout gray seabird called the rhinoceros auklet on a couple of islands in Washington, a field season typically lasts from May until August. Come fall, then, you have a choice: you can either dive into the data and analysis and statistical whatnot, or you can spend some […]