Author Archives Bruce Byers

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 …...

Walden: Diving in Deeper “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau In January of 1846, his first winter in his tiny house by Walden Pond, when Thoreau determined that the ice was finally thick and safe, he undertook a survey to determine the depth of the pond, which had generally been …...

Wading Into Walden April 2018. “Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; … and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?” With those lines Henry David Thoreau conveys his personal relationship with Walden Pond, where he made a formative experiment in observing life that became the basis for Walden, …...

A Walk on Wachusett April 2018. “Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travelers,” began the first sentence of Henry David Thoreau’s essay “A Walk to Wachusett.” This …...

Revisiting Cole’s View of The Oxbow April 2018. In 1836, Thomas Cole completed one of his most famous paintings, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm —The Oxbow.” That same year, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s groundbreaking transcendentalist essay, “Nature,” was published, and Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s protégé, was in his junior year at Harvard. Charles Darwin returned from his five-year …...