Diapause
While Chasing Nature takes a short break, here's some summer reading on seashells, owls, fakery and extinction.
CHASING NATURE is on a short break while Ruth and I, and our pup Odin, find respite on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. Although whales and gannets and a rare butterfly called Saltmarsh Copper beckon us north, it is tough to leave our home in Vermont. So much of our state remains in ruins after a horrific storm and flooding earlier this month.
My gratitude to all of you who’ve send along support. It means a lot to me.
I’ll also use this time away to think and write. In the meantime, here is a bit of reading from the Chasing Nature archives — early dispatches that many of you may not have seen. Thanks, everyone, for being here!
How I Touched Extinction
ALONE ON A TWO-MILE SHOAL off the North Carolina coast, I did not expect to encounter extinction. My aspirations that morning were far less profound: walking, thinking, writing and learning to identify a few seashells along the beach. But oceans are nothing less than seas of opportunity. Covering 70 percent of the earth’s surfa…
Arctic Owls on a Warming Planet
PERCHED ON A ROCKY POINT along the coast of Maine, the Snowy Owl is languid, indifferent, a predator without country. The wind and cold and crashing waves do not matter. You do not matter. The Snowy Owl cares not that you have driven halfway across winter to witness a white bird alone on the headlands.
Blackbirds, a Mule and Polygamy
NOW MORE THAN EVER, especially as I try to stop the world from spinning so fast, I find solace among the prosaic. This week’s image features wild things flying, Red-winged Blackbirds, and an indifferent mule after a snowfall in Gila, New Mexico. These are male blackbirds, showing their diagnostic red-and-yellow epaulets. And yet showtime for those should…
Fakery and an Insect
WE CLOSE 2022 with fraud. Not a flower, at least not one you might expect, this is a sedge in the genus Rhynchospora (the “beaksedges"). And while sedges certainly have flowers, those aren’t petals. During an insect expedition to Florida earlier this year, I fell big-time for this sedge, mostly its elegance, and wondered about the flowery ruse. Then a li…