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 […]
nature
Last week I found myself on the Hawaiian island of O‘ahu, part of — I swear! — a very arduous and intellectually demanding book-reporting trip. (More on that…someday.) After my grueling days of reportage, Elise and I headed up to the island’s North Shore, where, to our astonishment, we found the beaches positively littered with […]
The maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground. My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles […]
Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people […]
Brown Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a […]
Six or seven years ago, I bought a small, lopsided aloe plant from a holiday market for $7. I have neglected it for years, never changing its soil and rarely giving it enough light. It grew more and more crooked, and last year, its leaves (wait, do aloe have leaves? the fact that I don’t […]
Last week, I was wiping up crumbs when brown motion out the window caught my peripheral vision. It was not random. It was deliberate, but quick, and it was dark. It was not my dog, because she was under the high chair seeking the crumbs I was wiping. It was not my neighbor’s dog, who […]
Two days after the summer solstice, more than an hour after sunset, the sky a rich dark blue that is at last starting to deepen to black. Five of us are arrayed about a grassy swale near the top of the southeastern face of Protection Island. We have all our layers on and hunker down […]