The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the laptop bag of a nude sunbather, forcing an absurdly ridiculous birthday suit chase. When I lived in Berlin, I was […]
Animals
A well-known fact about beaver lodges, one that any close observer has surely noticed, is that they’re often home to muskrats. I’ve seen this many times, never more than last week up Clear Creek here in central Colorado, where three or four busy muskrats seemed to constantly be motoring to and from a lodge, gathering […]
This is Part 2 of my interview with Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. You can read Part 1 here. Kate: The main thing I took away from your early advice to me about book writing was “buy yourself […]
I can’t remember who noticed them first. From far away they looked like a crack in the pavement, or maybe a stick. But then someone crouched down, and then the rest of us did, and the crack or stick or trick of the light turned into a line of caterpillars. They came one after the […]
Earlier this month I visited Portugal for the first time, where I found much to love: the vertiginous cliffs overlooking the Nazaré beach, the ubiquitous custard tarts and dessert wines, the labyrinth of secret passages that veins Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. Uncultured nature-loving heathen that I am, however, I found myself most drawn to the country’s […]
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 […]
The invasion is now in full swing. I am not sure if I’ll make it beyond tonight. You have no idea what I’ve seen out there. It began a few nights ago, though it was chilly then. The earth gleamed with moisture. There were fewer of them; the cold and the rain held them off, […]