Two weeks ago, wandering my central Colorado town, I stumbled upon a beaver dam. This was both typical — I’ve spent much of the last eight years finding and loitering near beaver ponds — and surprising, insofar as the dam was tucked into a little suburban stream in a little suburban neighborhood, one of those […]
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 winter, having resolved to become better acquainted with our wild neighbors, I bought a trail camera. We’d been renting a cabin along a creek in the Arkansas Valley, and mink and foxes occasionally scuttled past our sliding backdoor. Who knew what other faunal wonders were traversing the property under cover of darkness? When I […]
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 […]
On March 1, 2022, Yellowstone National Park celebrated its 150th anniversary. I was privileged to work briefly for the Park Service there after college, and Elise and I make a point of returning every year; our honeymoon even revolved around a backpacking trip up Slough and Pebble Creeks. Until we visited last February to cross-country […]
Just before the turn of the new year, E.O. Wilson and Tom Lovejoy, two of the world’s most celebrated biologists, passed away within a day of each other. That they left the world together felt fitting, given the extraordinary interplay between their work. It was Wilson, after all, who, in a series of mad, ingenious […]
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 […]