I haven’t gone for a run in more than a year. The main reason I dislike running is that I’m lazy. But I have a second, slightly better excuse: Every time I run, my legs get unbearably itchy. It starts as a tingling in my thighs and calves. After several minutes, right around the time […]
Tomorrow, I’m driving to Oregon for a friend’s wedding. While I’m there, I may get a chance to witness what has been described as an “avian tornado”: thousands of Vaux’s swifts dive-bombing a chimney at a Portland elementary school. A Vaux’s swift is a petite, grayish bird with sharp swooping wings and a stubby tail. […]
This summer, I became slightly obsessed with the Ring. Not the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, not the Japanese horror movie (which I have vowed never to see), but the epic four-opera series by Richard Wagner. Der Ring des Nibelungen spans about 17 hours and features a cast of gods, dwarves, giants, mermaids, and a dragon, all […]
What is the most fearsome animal in the ocean? Is it the great white shark? The deadly stingray? The Megalodon? No. It is the Gribble. A gribble is an adorably chubby wee crustacean about three to six millimeters long. It has seven pairs of legs and four pairs of appendages sprouting around its mouth. And […]
The remains of a horned lizard killed by a shrike. Wandering around New York’s American Museum of Natural History one day in May, I noticed a bird called the fiscal shrike. The small stuffed specimen, black with dashes of white on its wings, was perched on a shrub in a diorama of Kenya’s Kedong Valley. […]
The Ramsay family has lived at the Bamff estate, 1300 acres of heathery hills and woodlands in eastern Scotland, for nearly eight centuries. Today, environmentalists Paul and Louise Ramsay share the property with three families of beavers. The couple brought the animals to Bamff in 2002 as part of a controversial effort to reintroduce European […]
One night in May, I idly watched a scene from a rerun of an Animal Planet show called Mermaids: The Body Found. An affable-looking biomechanics researcher named Stephen Pearsall was recounting an analysis of a mysterious marine mammal carcass. In what appeared to be a dramatic re-enactment, the camera zoomed in on torn animal tissue, […]
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t. CELESTE: You missed the last one. Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun. That […]