Bookmarks (53)

Mom spreads maps over the dining room table. They’re oldish, not ancient, but the home I see in them is not the home I know. They are all of Colorado—mostly cities at the nexus of Rocky Mountains and High Plains, 40, 50, 60 years ago. The outpost of Ward, a funky old mining town up […]

By the time you finish reading this paragraph, somewhere in America, someone — a long-haul trucker cruising a lonely highway in Iowa, a soccer dad piloting his Subaru through the Virginia suburbs, a lawyer commuting to her office in Atlanta or Bismarck or Madison — will have hit a white-tailed deer. Since the mid-20th century, […]

The forecast for Friday above five thousand feet called for more than a foot of snow, high winds, and temperatures well below freezing. So dire was the prediction that the National Weather Service had issued a Winter Storm Warning for much of the southern Cascades in Washington, and around Mount Hood in Oregon. “Why exactly […]

I write to tell you that I am always surrounded by animals. The woods are thick enough with pine and oak trees that I can barely see my neighbors’ houses, so sometimes I like to imagine that I have no human neighbors, and the only creatures sharing the woods with my family are nonhuman. The […]

“The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states […]

I wrote this post in 2018, and I’m happy to still be leaving on the same . . . road? * Let’s call the thoroughfare I live on Lemon Grove. There are two signs for it, one at each end of our block. Until very recently, one of the signs read, “Lemon Grove Avenue”. The […]

Hello friends, how are you holding up? Can I give you a hug? The world is burning, literally, and figuratively, but we can’t give in to despair. The shock and awe strategy we’ve been living through this last month is disorienting, infuriating and disheartening, but that’s the point. The people leading this assault on science and […]

I’m not actually much of a doomscroller, but my default choice when I want a moment of distraction is to hop over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post. And, lately, hopping over to Facebook, Instagram, or the Washington Post brings not fun distraction or even interesting diversion. Instead, it does nothing but give me […]

The first time I landed on the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, I immediately felt disoriented. The landscape was a monotonous flat white, with wind-scoured snow and ice extending to identical horizons in every direction. In this isolated spot 380 miles from the South Pole, the only point of reference was the pile of bags […]

I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]

This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI. Little fingers swipe and […]

Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars. So I do what I often do when […]

This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next […]

Maybe I’m not the only one who needs this right now? This post originally appeared on November 6, 2024

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 […]

My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and […]

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 […]

This post first ran last January, but it’s just as relevant now. Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series of vignettes about the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if […]

This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner.  Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]

I do government-adjacent work, so Friday afternoon I went out the front door to walk off my feelings and decided to turn right. As I neared the U.S. Capitol building, I started seeing people with going-home-from-a-protest energy (small groups, cheerful, heading away from major government buildings) and gangs of Architect of the Capitol staff cleaning […]

With California once again burning, I keep wondering, if those fires were coming our way, what would I save? I remember my cousin who, years ago, lost her house during a summer of flames; she’d been away from home when it burned, so there was no frantic effort to stuff the car with keepsakes. After […]

I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with […]

I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with […]

I wrote this post in 2019, when I was feeling prickly and uncertain–not too different than how I’m feeling these days. We do have a few more orchids now, although I still am not quite sure how to care for them. * I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly […]

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 […]

Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I […]

Key:* = Pretty darn sure** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.* This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who […]

This post first appeared in March 2023. I can’t wait to go to the beach again. Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college. As […]

Ed. note: Yes, certainly, parts of last year were pretty bad, yes, we noticed that. But not everything is terrible at all times in every way. And maybe, possibly, even probably, in this new year good things will happen. Craig: A Robbie Robertson song contains some of my favorite lyrics:Give us the strengthGive us the […]

Ed. note: Yes, certainly, parts of last year were pretty bad, yes, we noticed that. But not everything is terrible at all times in every way. And maybe, possibly, even probably, in this new year good things will happen. Becky: Maybe the Steller’s jays will hop back and forth on the pine outside the kitchen […]

* 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 […]

Ed. note: Now, even more than last year, it’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not all, but some!) are good. Here are a few of the things that gave us hope, lifted our spirits, and gave us a […]

And the People of LWON, on this day, are taking a break. They will be back, they promise, rarin’ to go, on Friday. Please come back. ________ Photo: By Markus Koljonen (Dilaudid) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4270871

Jenny:  It’s the first full year without my dad, which makes my heart hurt. And then one of my dogs, Geddy, goes and dies. Well, he got hurt first, and there was a lot of pain, and he was kind of old and not a great candidate for surgery, and we tried to manage his […]

Something funny happened during the time that I spent writing my book: I stopped reading for pleasure. Not because I wanted to, but because I was reading so much for research that reading began to feel like work. But then my book came out, and I traveled around the country giving book talks at lovely […]

Here’s some moss I saw on a recent walk along the Thames River, west of London. The Thames itself was too high to walk where my traveling companion and I had planned – the trail was underwater, and so were lots of fields and the meadow in the background of this photo, where a woman […]

As I was researching and writing DOG SMART, trying to understand what it means to think like a dog and experience the world as a dog, I had an epiphany of sorts: Dogs around the world wandering the streets—the “village” dogs you are bound to see roaming here and there, often with a few pals, […]

This post ran back in 2018 and digging it up was another act unearthing oneself, something I end up doing when rummaging in my car, when I clean my desk. Our own lives are archaeology. Put a trowel in your hand and go through your past. Bounce ground penetrating radar through your heart. See what […]

I’ve suffered from migraines my whole adult life—two day-long affairs that I would slog through with an unwise amount of cumulative Advil. Until, that is, a neurologist offered me a calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP)-inhibitor, the first new pain treatment in decades. It’s solved the problem with a decisiveness I would never have thought possible. For […]

Last week, Ann wrote about her moon epiphany and Our Becky’s book (Ann: “Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award”) about our most glorious satellite. I got to ask Becky about Our Moon in January, and I’m thinking of this conversation again at […]

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 […]

I was reading Becky’s beautiful book (Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award) and she was talking about how ancient people figured out amazing things about the moon. And by the way, ancient people figured out amazing things in general, like the circumference […]

This is the game my older son and I played one weekend a few years ago. He would bolt into a four-lane thoroughfare, and I would shout and jump around: “Get out of the street! It’s not safe! GetoutgetoutGETOUT!” Then I would dash into the street after him and we would laugh and laugh. And […]

In December of 2019 I visited Maine to see if it might be a good place for me to live. From the airport I drove straight to the sea. The sky was violet, the ground was covered in snow, and the only other person there was a young woman leaning against the railing, looking out […]

I took this photo in the veterinary lab at the Duke Lemur Center in October, on a tour at the National Association of Science Writers meeting. The bin sat next to a sterile operating room where, according to the scientist who was showing us around, they mostly do emergency caesareans for lemur mothers in distress. […]

Today, I give thanks for the snood. My amusement begins with the word itself, which rhymes with rude. Try enunciating it several times in a row, slowly, and you’ll see what I mean. But the snood is more than just a delightful word and common crossword puzzle answer. It’s also a comedic example of sexual selection […]

Last month I wrote about maps and dog walks and grief and stuff, and I illustrated it with a photo of a majestic stump in my partner’s neighborhood. I guess life needed to give me a lesson about impermanence, because that stump is now half gone. I imagine the city plans to plant a new […]

For the past month or so I have been in Argentina at Punta Tombo, a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Punta Tombo is not without its pleasures–how could one fail to enjoy spending hours a day with penguins?–but hanging over everything we do is the grim fact that the colony is declining. Since 1987, when […]

I’ve been setting up wildlife cameras at natural pinch points and along trackways to see what’s going on when I’m not looking. I’ll admit, it feels invasive. Candid moments of animals are caught without permission, my cameras quiet enough that subjects don’t glance up even for the second or third shot, a black bear strolling […]