August 2017. Chapter VI of Cannery Row, John Steinbeck’s fond short novel about his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts, starts like this: “Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is Read More
October 7th, 2017. After years of making a faithful fall pilgrimage to Cape May, New Jersey, to watch the migration of hawks and monarch butterflies, my consulting travel schedule overruled the annual tradition in 2014, and I haven’t been back Read More
April 2017. In my previous story, I described my impressions of another spring on the grasslands of the Ukrainian steppe and explained that this was my second trip to Ukraine to conduct a biodiversity assessment for the U.S. Agency for Read More
July 2016. Breakfast at Annie’s Lodge in Zomba, with a big French press of Malawian “Mzuzu” coffee. I took the leftovers in my travel mug when Miles, the driver from LTS, picked us up at 8 AM. We drove north Read More
December 2016. Deltas are dynamic and fascinating places, geologically and ecologically, as I was reminded during a December visit to New Orleans and points west and south: the vast delta of the Mississippi, where rain and rivers from all of Read More
December 2016. It was a sunny late morning on a cool December day when we arrived at the Oakley Plantation in south-central Louisiana near St. Francisville, about two hours on fast highways from New Orleans. It would have been a Read More
January 2016. In my mind mahogany is one of nature’s wonders, one of the most beautiful woods in the world. Maybe that’s because my dad decided to use mahogany paneling in my bedroom when he was building the house where Read More
January 2016. The Department of Petén covers the northern third of Guatemala. It is a vast region of lowland forests, rivers and lakes, home to only around four percent of Guatemala’s population of 15 million. It’s a long way from Read More
In his essay “The Round River,” Aldo Leopold wrote: “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part Read More
April 2016. We arrived late in the afternoon after a drive up and over steep and sometimes rough gravel roads into the Chilean coastal range west of Angol. The road wound into the hills, covered almost completely with tree plantations of Read More
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 …...