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.

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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Picnicking in Deep Time

Leaning against a big old log while eating lunch, I felt vaguely uneasy. It reminded me of a big driftwood log I’ve sat by on a beach in Oregon, except this log was solid rock. I was in the Petrified
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Screeching Macaw, Unseen Jaguar

Forested ridges rolled away in the early morning light as far as the eye could see from the top of Canaa, Sky Place Temple, at the ancient Mayan ruins of Caracol. Howler monkeys were still roaring from the tall trees
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