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.

Cyamudongo Forest: Chimpanzees, Batwa, and Tea

October 2014. Cyamudongo is a small forest fragment southwest of the mountain forests of the Nyungwe National Park in southwestern Rwanda, and is administratively part of the park. Cyamudongo – the “cya” is pronounced “cha,” but with a soft “c”
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Mukura Forest Calling

September 2014. “Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?” Serge, my Rwandan consulting team member, was trying to call our contact at Mukura  Forest, the District Forestry Officer, on his cell phone.  We were driving up a rough rural road through
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Forest of Hope: A Visit to Gishwati Forest

September 2014. Sipping a draft Mützig in the patio restaurant at the hotel in Gisenyi, lightning flashing out over Lake Kivu.  Storms still around, after the fierce downpour this afternoon driving from Musanze to Gisenyi, where we stopped along the
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Islands of Biodiversity in the African Sky: Golden Monkeys and Irish Potatoes

September 2014. The view from my east-facing window at the Gorillas Hotel in Musanze before dawn was promising.  Even though Mount Muhabura was enveloped in clouds, the rest of the sky was clear.  After a quick breakfast we left for
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Searching for Grauer’s Swamp-Warbler at the Top of the Nile

September 2014. Tucked among the mille collines of northern Rwanda is a huge, high-elevation marsh called Rugezi. On a map, or on Google Earth, Rugezi appears among the “thousand hills” – as “mille collines” translates from the French of the
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The Art of Ecology: Audubon’s Oystercatchers and Other Examples

November 2014. After visiting John James Audubon’s (1785-1851) first home in America, Mill Grove, not far from Philadelphia, I was looking again through his masterwork, Birds of America. When I came to the plate of the Black Oystercatcher, I realized that
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Not Nature Apart Either: A Case Study of Point Reyes National Seashore and the Drakes Bay Oyster Company

August 2014. What I liked so much about Point Reyes when I first started hiking and camping there as a college undergraduate was that it combined natural ecosystems and human uses in a beautiful mosaic, a “working landscape,” a balance of
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Not Man Apart: Genealogy of an Ecological Worldview

August 2014. Robinson Jeffers, a now little-known Californian poet who was widely known in the 1920s to 1940s, was on the cover of Time Magazine on April 4, 1932. His poem, “The Answer,” published in 1936, ends with these lines:
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At Church with John Muir

August 2014. The wind across Tuolumne Meadows was stronger and cooler than we had expected for mid-August as we parked at the trailhead and started on the John Muir Trail for Cathedral Peak. In My First Summer in the Sierra,
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All I Came To Seek I’ve Found: Closing the Loop with John Muir in California

August 2014. Waiting in Buenos Aires for a ship that would take him to Africa, the second leg of the last major journey of his life, John Muir wrote to his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn in late November, 1911: “All
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    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 …...
    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 …...