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.

Women and Woodland Conservation in Malawi

April 2013. Mount Mulanje rises like an island above the rolling landscape southeast of Blantyre in southeastern Malawi. By examining images taken by the French SPOT 5 Earth-observation satellite, the Malawian team I was working with on an evaluation of USAID-funded
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Restoring Miombo Woodlands for Village Development in Malawi

April 2013. Matupi Village, in the Rumphi District of northern Malawi, is tucked in a valley on the southern border of Nyika National Park. We reached Matupi on a warm, sunny afternoon, after a long drive on rough dusty roads. It
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Documenting Forest Change at the Muir Site

February 2013. Returning to the site where Muir camped and sketched, we followed the route he described, as we had last year. It was a hot summer day, and the thousand-foot climb to the ridge, which Muir described as steep
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Following Muir’s Route in Sketches and Photos

February 2013. Marcelo Mila, the Mapuche leader of the group now living at the old Smith fundo of Ontario, first took us to see the view to the southeast, over the gentle valley of the Río Quino.  The view matched
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Maples, Mapuches, and Monkey Puzzles: Human Dimensions of John Muir’s Travels in Chile

February 2013. Few people are aware that John Muir, a founding father of American conservation, travelled alone to Chile in 1911 at the age of 73 because he wanted to see the Monkey Puzzle Tree, Araucaria araucana, in its native forests.
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Pondering the Ponds of Nags Head Woods

November 10th, 2012. Hurricane Sandy had brushed by North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Halloween, and some beachfront neighborhoods were still assessing the damage and digging out a week and a half later. But today was a glorious fall Saturday, with
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Mangroves in Mozambique: Green Infrastructure for Coastal Protection in an Era of Climate Change

20 September 2012.  After wading across the low tide mudflats at the Port of Angoche, and into knee-deep water to climb into the fiberglass boat, the big Yamaha outboard wouldn’t start.  While we bobbed lazily in the hot sun and
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Stopping Slash and Burn Farming in Saja Village

20 September 2012. A large crowd of people were gathered in Saja Village when we arrived at about 9 AM on another sunny morning. Our silver 4X4 Ford “Everest” looked as out of place among the thatched huts as a
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Cape May Hawks and Monarchs

Friday October 12th, 2012. We drove north from Washington toward New York in heavy Friday traffic on Interstate 95, across upper Delaware Bay at Wilmington, and then down through the New Jersey Pinelands on a sunny, breezy mid-October day. Oaks,
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Potoni Sacred Forest

Friday 21 September 2012.  We sat in the shade of an old spreading mango tree in Namutoria Village and talked with community for an hour or so.  About thirty community members, and five forest guards in green army-style uniforms sat
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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 …...