I took a train with my high school kid to Salt Lake City for a little urban immersion on Winter Break. We disembarked at 2:30 in the morning in a city experiencing what some said was the biggest blizzard they’d seen in a decade. That early morning, with packs on our backs, we walked into […]
Nature
Ravens do not generally hang around in my neighborhood, here in northwest Washington, D.C. The common raven lives in a lot of places – much of Europe and Asia; most of Canada, the western U.S. and Mexico; south into Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. According to the map on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Common Raven […]
Earlier this month, Elise and I traveled to the Osa Peninsula, the appendage of tropical forest that juts off southwest Costa Rica into the Pacific Ocean. We chose that part of the country primarily to visit Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile protected area that the National Geographic Society once described, curiously, as the “most biologically […]
Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty Introduction A good […]
Last week on my podcast, my co-host and bestie Rosemerry asked me the last time I’d experienced awe. The honest truth was, I experience it almost every evening this time of year. For reasons that I’ll explain shortly, winter sunsets are the best sunsets. They are very often awe-inducing, and that means that they’re good […]
I’m on an email listserv for people who study bees. Not honeybees (goodness, no, not honeybees). All the other bees. There are some 20,000 species of bees in the world. Tiny metallic green ones, big fuzzy ones, and everything in between. I rarely read the emails – it’s more fun to imagine what they might […]
It is still January, but the plants here don’t seem to know it. The evergreen pear trees along my street burst into flurries of cloud-colored blossoms last weekend. Along my neighbor’s garage, the hedgehog aloe shows off its orange flowers. Elsewhere, there are fingerprints of the recent storms’ destruction: beaches scoured of sand, roads crumbling […]