Author Archives Bruce Byers

About Bruce Byers

Bruce Byers Bruce Byers is an ecologist, writer, and international ecological consultant. His creative nonfiction writing tells stories of science and conservation from around the world. As an independent consultant, he assists government agencies, NGOs, and the private sector in the United States and worldwide with strategies for conserving biodiversity and improving the human-nature relationship.

Following John Muir’s Footsteps in the Petrified Forest

October 30, 2013. Just after the death of his wife Louie Strenzel Muir in August, 1905, seeking to escape his grief and find relief for his youngest daughter Helen’s tuberculosis, John Muir travelled with his daughters to eastern Arizona. They settled
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Searching the Black Forest for Fire Scars on Halloween

October 31st, 2013. In my last story I described how my dad and I found a piece of a fossil tree trunk thirty years ago with what turned out to be the first fossil fire scar ever reported or described. I
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Fire Scar on a Triassic Tree

November 2013. Fire scars on trees have fascinated me since I first learned to recognize them.  Maybe because of their metaphorical quality: fire burns through the forest, but this tree survives with only part of its bark burned and cambium killed.
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Peregrination to Cape May for Hawks and Monarchs

October 14th, 2013. This was my annual pilgrimage to Cape May, New Jersey, which I’ve written about in past years.  I call it a “pilgrimage,” because it is a journey – although not too far, really – that for me has
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Turtle Beaches on the Gulf of Fonseca

September 2013. The Olive Ridley, Lepidochelys olivacea, the smallest of the sea turtles, comes ashore to lay eggs on the Pacific beaches of the Honduran Golfo de Fonseca. September is the peak nesting month. We wanted to see them if we
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Ecohydrology of the Honduran Highlands

September 2013. A few months ago, preparing for an assessment of climate change adaptation and biodiversity conservation in Honduras, I was googling my way through the landscape of information that these days appears in response to any search of key words. 
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A Sunday on Cerro Guanacaure, Honduras

August 2013. We left the rambling, hacienda-like Hotel Gualiqueme in the dark at 5:15 AM, and crossed the long suspension bridge over the Río Choluteca, heading east toward the border with Nicaragua. But we soon turned north, passing through the little
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Callas, Skunk Cabbages, and the World’s Biggest Flower

July 2013. I’ve always loved the look of arums, those lovely flowers of the family Araceae, with their hoods and stalks, spathes and spadixes. Many people are familiar with them because of the common indoor plantings of “peace lilies,” various
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Colorado Fires and Firemoths

June 2013. Forest fires along the Front Range of Colorado are making the national news already this year.  The Black Forest fire between Denver and Colorado Springs, finally contained on June 20th after burning 14,000 acres, was the most destructive fire
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It’s A Strange Courage You Give Me, Ancient Crabs

Call it “eco-poetic license.” Here is a sequel to my last story, “Annual Pilgrimage to the Delaware Bay in May.” Continuing the “ecology of mind” theme, these are more imagistic and poetic reflections of those trips in past years. May
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    Not Man Apart: A Conversation with Robinson Jeffers about How to Live in These Times I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Robinson Jeffers, a Californian poet who was widely known and read beginning in the 1920s, through the 1930s and 40s, and into perhaps the 1970s in some, especially environmentalist, circles.1 Jeffers was on the cover of Time magazine on April 4, 1932, unusual notoriety for a poet. In …...
    Mount Tamalpais Moods On my recent “book tour” to the San Francisco Bay Area to talk about and promote my book Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast, I had planned to stay at the UC Berkeley’s Point Reyes Field Station. But those plans fell through suddenly and unexpectedly when I arrived at …...
    Nature on the Edge: California Biosphere Book Tour When I returned in late October to Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington, D.C., suburb where I’ve lived for more than thirty years, after a five-day, 3,000-mile drive from California, I had an old Joni Mitchell song stuck in my head: … / but I wouldn’t want to stay here/ it’s too old and cold and …...
    Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast My new book from Oregon State University Press will be out in September 2024! You can pre-order online at Oregon State University’s website: Nature on the Edge: Lessons for the Biosphere from the California Coast I hope you enjoy and learn from Nature on the Edge!  I am planning a number of in-person events (readings, …...
    The View from Mukuntuweap February 2024. The canyons here are eroded into mostly Jurassic strata that were deposited near sea level roughly 200 million years ago, and later folded up by orogenic forces that raised them to elevations of up to 10,000 feet. In the recent instant of geological history since our human species reached this continent, this landscape …...
    The Cream in the Gooseberry Fool It’s a tale of obsession, religion, money, passion, beauty, science, and sex—every good story should have at least some sex in it, right? And it’s a tale of mystery. Actually, it’s two interwoven tales. The first relates to the Reverend Gilbert Henry Raynor, rector of Hazeleigh, a small village in Essex, England, at the turn …...
    Revisiting Poetry Cove August 2023. In my last story, I wrote about revisiting the tidepool at Middle Cove of Cape Arago on the central Oregon coast where I’d done some of my doctoral research. On that trip I also went back to another significant place at Cape Arago that I call “Poetry Cove.” Here’s the background: During my …...
    Revisiting the Great Tidepool Sunday, August 13, 2023. It was a decent low tide, less than a foot below the MLLW (mean of lower low water), the “0” of tide tables, but still low enough to easily get into the mid-intertidal zone. And at a decent hour too, a little after 0-dark-thirty. It was already starting to get light …...
    Whalers and Quakers On a recent trip to Cape Cod, we spent the first night in New Bedford, Massachusetts, once known as “the city that lit the world” because its whaling fleet was the largest in the world and whale oil was the fuel of choice for oil lamps (and spermaceti, from sperm whales, for the best candles). …...
    Walking the Cape with Henry Cape Cod, Thoreau’s last book, begins with “Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean…” and the final sentence concludes “A man may stand there and put all America behind him.” It was published posthumously in 1865, three years after his early death from tuberculosis at the age of …...