Author Archives Bruce Byers

More Fun and Philosophy in the Andrews Experimental Forest In my last story posted here, “Explorations in Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest,” I described some adventures during a two-week residency in October, 2019. My opportunity to be there was thanks to the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, a collaboration between Oregon State University and the US Forest Service. I was …...

Explorations in Oregon’s Andrews Experimental Forest The H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, located in the Willamette National Forest on the western slope of the Cascade Range, is one of 84 experimental forests in a network established by the U.S. Forest Service. It is one of the most well-studied forests in the world, famous for the long-term...

Deep Ecology in the Mammoth Cave Area Biosphere Reserve, Kentucky The Ecological Society of America (ESA) held its annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, from August 11-16 this year. I depend on these annual events to catch up with the cutting edge of ecological research and thinking that is relevant to my ecological consulting, and with ecologist friends and colleagues from across the country. Field trips …...

Report from a Season at Cascade Head February 2019. My last posting, “Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise,” came at the end of September. Now I should explain why it’s been so long since I’ve written anything here. I’ve just returned to my home base in a Washington DC suburb after nearly four months at Cascade Head on the Oregon Coast. At the …...

Monarch Field of Dreams: Reprise In the spring of 2010, I dug up a few milkweed plants along a bike path I often ran along and transplanted them to my garden. As I wrote then in a blog titled “Field of Dreams of Monarchs,” I had a very optimistic “if you plant them, they will come” vision. And, sure enough, …...

Canoeing Louisiana’s Manchac Swamp with Ecological Aliens and the Voodoo Queen My flight from Washington, DC, to New Orleans on the first Friday of August was delayed for seven hours by mechanical problems, so instead of getting to my hotel in time for happy hour in the French Quarter, I arrived at 1:30 AM, exhausted. The next morning, I headed for Café Beignet on Royal Street, …...

Walking on the Trembling Prairie As we stepped out into the open marsh after crossing over the tree-covered spoil bank along the canal by which we had reached this place on a large pontoon boat, the feel of the ground was immediately, noticeably different. We pushed our way through chest-high grasses and other marsh plants, watching carefully where we placed …...

More Colorado Fires and Firemoths and More On a trip to Colorado two years ago, in July 2016, I was driving down from a trailhead in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area after a glorious hike to Arapahoe Pass when I saw the plume of smoke pushing up to the east, high enough to start forming a “pyronimbus” cloud – essentially a thunderhead …...

The Internalization of a Land Ethic: A Visit to Coon Valley, Wisconsin US Highway 14 drops into the town of Coon Valley after passing through Viroqua and Westby in the scenic landscape of the Driftless Area, a unique pocket of American geology, 85% of which is in western Wisconsin. The repeated pulses of the ice ages that pushed continental ice sheets across most of nearby North America …...

A Morning at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison “I have to go there!” I wrote in the margin beside this sentence written by Aldo Leopold in 1934: “If civilization consists of cooperation with plants, animals, soil, and men, then a university which attempts to define that cooperation must have for the use of its faculty and students, places which show what the land …...