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. Read More
About a year ago, in October 2016, I was in Quelimane, Mozambique, a small city on the central coast and the capital city of Zambezia Province. Quelimane is located in the delta of the Rio dos Bons Sinais, as the Read More
November 14, 2017. I’ve spent a few days in November at the Outer Banks of North Carolina every year since 2010 now, and every time I go I learn something new. In past years I’ve written stories about the ponds Read More
Dear friends and colleagues, My 100th blog, Pondering the Ponds of Nags Head Woods Again, was posted on December 6th, 2016, and my first story, Mt. Kenya and Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, was posted on September 6th 2011, soon after my Read More
The Ecological Society of America held its annual meeting this year in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The conference theme was “Novel Ecosystems in the Anthropocene.” I’ve written about the “Anthropocene,” or alluded to it, in many stories I’ve posted here, most Read More
“This sudden plash into pure wildness – baptism in Nature’s warm heart – how utterly happy it made us!” John Muir wrote in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, describing his arrival, in 1849 at the age of eleven, Read More
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 Read More
July 2015. Two years ago in June, as the giant Black Forest fire near Colorado Springs, Colorado, was just being contained, I wrote about a tiny, brightly colored, fire-dependent moth, Schinia masoni, the Colorado Firemoth. If you want to see this Read More
May 2015. When I checked John Burroughs’s first book of nature essays, Wake-Robin, out of the Stanford Library where I was an undergraduate, I wrote him off as an eastern nature wimp. My hero was John Muir, who described climbing to Read More
From the terrace in front of the mansion, with its stone towers and steep roofs of shiny grey local slate, the lawn sloped steeply down toward the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, and gave a long view east over the Delaware Read More
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 …...
More Ecological Explorations at the Edge of the Continent
October 2021. In my last story posted here I described my ecological explorations in the San Francisco Bay area in June during a writing residency at The Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, right on the San Andreas Fault at the south end of Tomales Bay. I was gathering information and experiences for essays about …...
Ecological Explorations at the Edge of the Continent
June 2021. At about the time the coronavirus pandemic struck in the spring of 2020, I was preparing my application for a writing residency at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes Station, California. It was an exciting opportunity I had learned about because several of my favorite writers, including Rebecca Solnit and Robin Kimmerer, are …...
Planting Chestnuts at Sky Meadows
March 22, 2021. It was a beautiful morning as I drove west on I-66 and turned north toward Sky Meadows State Park. From the Crooked Run Valley, the meadows sweep up to the old farm and on toward the ridge to the west, along which the Appalachian Trail runs. The parking lot beside the visitor …...
A Decade of American Chestnut Restoration on Timber Lane
September 2020. In my last story posted here, A Decade of Monarchs and Milkweeds, I described how a decade ago, just as I was leaving a job at an international consulting firm where I had worked for about five years and re-starting my independent consulting business, an experiment to attract monarchs to my yard by …...
A Decade of Monarchs and Milkweeds
September 2020. This September marked ten years since I left a job at a consulting firm where I had worked for about five years and restarted the independent consulting business I’d first started in 1994. I wrote about that in 2010 in a story titled “Field of Dreams of Monarchs.” On my last day commuting …...
Coronavirus, Human Hubris, and Life in the Coevolving Biosphere
The novel coronavirus is holding up a mirror for our species, giving us an opportunity to consider our place in the evolution of life on Earth and question our anthropocentrism. What I’ve missed during this pandemic and shutdown of our usual social and economic life is writing or reporting that puts this experience, unprecedented in …...