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.

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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Annual Pilgrimage to the Delaware Bay in May

May 2013. I am pulled here every year in May, to the western shore of Delaware Bay not far north of its mouth at Cape Henlopen, to Mispillion Harbor, where the Mispillion River and Cedar Creek merge in a small estuary,
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Islands of Biodiversity in the African Sky – The Nyika Plateau

April 2013. In a previous story I wrote about the archipelago of mountain ranges that scatters across eastern Africa between Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa.  These East African mountains are a Galapagos of speciation and
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A Strategy to Stabilize the Agricultural Frontier and Conserve Biodiversity in Malawi

April 2013. The biggest threat to biodiversity worldwide is the conversion of natural ecosystems to agriculture. It follows that the highest-priority action needed to conserve biodiversity is to stop this conversion by stabilizing the agricultural frontier, especially on the fringes of
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Islands of Biodiversity in the African Sky – Mulanje Mountain

April 2013. An archipelago of mountain ranges scatters across eastern Africa between Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa.  Most of these mountain blocks rise 2,000 meters or more – some to over 3,000 meters – above
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    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 …...
    The View from Limuw The indigenous inhabitants of the island called it limuw, “in the ocean.” A prosaic but apt geographical name for the place. The name has a very matter-of-fact, here and now implication. But the Spanish who explored the Chumash Channel and its islands beginning in the 16th century and colonized the area with their string of …...
    The Chumash Channel and its Islands When Spanish explorer Juan Cabrillo sailed into the Santa Barbara Channel in 1542, he found a thriving indigenous maritime culture living along the coasts and on the Channel Islands. One thing that impressed the Spaniards were the large seagoing canoes. One major coastal village had so many canoes on the beach that Cabrillo called it …...
    The Art of Ecological Restoration on Santa Cruz Island The large fabric print hanging on the west wall of the dining room of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve research station caught my eye immediately. A tangle of creatures drawn in detailed black covered the white background, intertwining in almost Escher-like fashion. There were sheep and foxes, eagles and jays, oaks and mallows, skunks and …...
    Evolutionary Ecology on California’s Galapagos Sunday, October 24th. Our reservations for the trip to Prisoners Harbor on the north shore of Santa Cruz Island had been made months ago. But the weather during the past week had forced Island Packers, the commercial concessionaire that provides transportation for visitors to the four northern islands within Channel Islands National Park, to cancel …...