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.

The Map Is Not the Territory

14 September 2012.  We drove onto the small twelve-car ferry just before 6:00 AM on a Friday morning, heading across Maputo Bay for Catembe past the brightly lighted docks under grey dawn skies.  It was already starting to sprinkle a
Read More

Monkey Business in Oregon

August 10th, 2012. Learning about John Muir’s obsession – it probably deserves to be called that – with the ancient tree family Araucariaceae, and especially Araucaria araucana, the “Monkey Puzzle Tree,” I became very interested in Muir’s story and in
Read More

Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains and Kilombero Wetlands

June 2012. The Udzungwa Mountains rise steeply above the valley of the Kilombero River, their eastern face almost an escarpment. These are one of the mountain blocks of the ancient Eastern Arc Mountains, which stretch from the Taita Hills in
Read More

An Interconnection of Ecologists: The Ecological Society of America’s 2012 Annual Meeting

12th of August, 2012. Old English is full of “terms of venery,” words for groups of animals: a pod of whales, a pack of wolves, a herd of deer, a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, a pride of
Read More

Visiting Revolutionary Ecological Relatives in Philadelphia

July 12th, 2012. If they are blood relatives, the connection is distant, and untraceable.  But they are some of my intellectual and philosophical ancestors, and this past weekend I made a pilgrimage of sorts, to Philadelphia, to visit the old
Read More

The Great Ruaha Versus Rice

The Rufiji River is Tanzania’s largest in terms of flow. Its catchment in the southern highlands stretches from Mbeya in the southwest, to its mouth at the Rufiji Delta, inshore from Mafia Island on the Indian Ocean. The Ruaha River,
Read More

Conserving Watershed Forests in Sierra Leone’s Western Area Peninsula

The Freetown Peninsula is one of the only parts of coastal Africa, and the only place in West Africa, where mountains meet the coast.  When Portuguese explorer Pedro de Cintra sailed past this coast in 1462 he imagined he saw
Read More

Tracking John Muir to the Monkey Puzzle Forests of Chile

Few people know that John Muir – nature writer, champion of Yosemite, and a founding father of the American environmental movement and of our system of national parks – traveled to South America in 1911, alone at the age of
Read More

Snow Geese Knit Arctic and Mid-Atlantic

Walking along the shore of the Arctic Ocean in a stiff cold wind… were those patches of white just offshore clusters of sea ice? Maybe… No! Those white objects suddenly rose up in a noisy cloud, swirling above the water
Read More

A Pilgrimage to the Monarch Butterfly Overwintering Refuges in Michoacán, México

On cold, grey, winter days in January and February a bright memory sometimes flutters into my mind, and I’m off on a daydream of a trip to see overwintering monarch butterflies in their mountain refuges in México in 2004, now
Read More

  • Stay in the know!

    [mc4wp_form id=”3244″]

  • Connect With Me

    Bruce Byers Consulting Facebook Bruce Byers Consulting LinkedIn Bruce Byers Consulting Email

  • Recent Posts

    Araucarilândia: Ecology, Culture, and Conservation of Araucaria angustifolia The primary goal of my recent trip to trip to southern Brazil was to go to the places John Muir visited in 1911 on his quest to see Araucaria angustifolia, one of the species of the ancient conifer family with which he was fascinated, and to see for myself what had changed compared with the …...
    A Visit to the Big Tree We had spent the morning with Dr. Rafael Barbizan Sühs, a landscape ecologist working at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis. Rafael’s research focuses on the Araucaria-grassland mosaic of southern Brazil’s high plateau, the planalto, and he had taken us to see some of his research sites in the Parque Nacional de São …...
    The Araucaria War We arrived at the Municipal Museum of History and Heritage in Três Barras, located in the old railway station, just before its closing time of 5:00 p.m. on a Tuesday in early June. The enthusiastic manager, who had been expecting us earlier, was happy to keep the museum open for our gang of curious out-of-town …...
    Following John Muir to Brazil in Search of the Paraná Pine On August 12th, 1911, John Muir left New York on a ship bound for Belém, Brazil. He had just spent a couple of hot summer months on the East Coast, lobbying against the Hetch Hetchy Dam in Washington, DC, negotiating with his publishers in New York, and visiting old friends and colleagues. He was 73 …...
    Remembering Ecologist Paul Ehrlich When I was maybe fifteen, my always optimistic and encouraging mother gave me an envelope with a five-dollar bill and a note that said “To start a fund to feed the people of the world.” It must have been her response to one of the wide-ranging discussions we often had, about everything we’d read about …...
    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 …...