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.

John Muir Slept Here, and the Mystery of the Missing Monkey Puzzle Pictures

April 2016. In his journal entry for November 20th, 1911, John Muir wrote: “Foggy morn 6 o clock packing for the lofty ridges where grows Araucaria imbricata.” He had arrived in Victoria, Chile, on November 14th, and after being delayed for
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Following Up on Following John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

April 2016. I’ve written several stories before about two previous trips to Chile with my son Jonathan, during which we reconstructed the route taken by John Muir in 1911 in his little-known quest to see forests of Araucaria araucana, the monkey
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The View from El Cañi

April 2016. It was a glorious, crisp, sunny fall Sunday when we turned into the small parking lot at the trailhead of the Sanctuario El Cañi in the village of Pichares, about 20 kilometers east of Pucón, Chile. Pucón is a
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Coffee and Quetzal at Los Tarrales, Guatemala

January 2013. I’d taken a cup of the home-grown local café de la finca and a piece of leftover cake from dinner dessert the night before in the dark of the old house where I was staying at 5 AM.
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In Search of the Sublime with Albert Bierstadt in Brooklyn

February 2016. It was Valentine’s Day, Sunday, February 14th, sunny and clear. But an Arctic blast on Saturday night had sent temperatures below zero in Central Park, making this the coldest Valentine’s Day in New York City on record and the coldest day
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Butterflies in a Blizzard, or Chaos in Colorado and What It Means for Us

January 2016. My flight to Denver from Washington’s Dulles Airport was on time on December 15th, even though the previous United flight had been cancelled by a hard-striking snowstorm in Colorado. A low, white blanket of patterned clouds covered the
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Pondering the Palms of Cape Hatteras

November 2015. A serendipitous trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in early November gave me a personal, human scale for understanding some ecological facts about climate, climate change, and coastal plant communities. I ran the Outer Banks Marathon on
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Travels in Alaska: Seeking the Sublime Among Glaciers and Fjords

September 2015. All but one of the 40 glaciers that flow from the Harding Icefield, which caps the Kenai Mountains on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, spill into a handful of fjords that connect with Resurrection Bay and the Gulf of Alaska. I
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Time Travels in Alaska

After a sunset touchdown in Anchorage, I spent Saturday night in the Puffin Inn, a two-star motel, and after a two-star high-calorie breakfast at Gywnnie’s Old Alaska Restaurant just up the street the next morning, I was finally driving south
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Laudato Si’: The Pope’s Encyclical on Care for Our Common Home

September 2015. Pope Francis’s visit to Washington, DC, this week motivated me to speed up my reading of his lengthy and weighty encyclical on climate change, ecology, and humans and nature, “Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home.” The document
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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 …...