~the-last-word-on-no | Bookmarks (53)

The first time I landed on the Siple Coast of West Antarctica, I immediately felt disoriented. The landscape was a monotonous flat white, with wind-scoured snow and ice extending to identical horizons in every direction. In this isolated spot 380 miles from the South Pole, the only point of reference was the pile of bags […]

I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I […]

This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI. Little fingers swipe and […]

Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars. So I do what I often do when […]

This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next […]

Maybe I’m not the only one who needs this right now? This post originally appeared on November 6, 2024

Colony: Punta Tombo, Chubut, Argentina Date: 9 November Site: RFID B Nest: 708H Nest type: Burrow, northwest-facing, mid-slope, concealed from above Penguin: Male, toe-tag no. 14113/RFID no. 37189 Device: AX3 accelerometer no. 99290, day three of a five-day deployment Nest Contents: Two eggs Notes: Purpose is to ground truth time-stamped accelerometry data from AX3 with […]

My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and […]

Note: This post is best read on a computer screen, but a phone’ll still work. One day last year, my friend Tonya messaged our group chat with a lovely update: a heron had landed in front of their house to eat a fish. The rest of us were enchanted by the thought of it, but […]

This post first ran last January, but it’s just as relevant now. Years ago, Carol Evans, then a Bureau of Land Management biologist in northeastern Nevada, told me she wanted to write a book called Stream Stories — a series of vignettes about the many creeks that webbed her region and defined her career. I have no idea if […]

This post began with a question from my dear friend, the novelist and documentary filmmaker George Lerner.  Looking over two years of footage from South Texas, I noticed something striking: I have lots and lots of glorious images filmed around sunset, but scant few decent shots at sunrise. Why is this, I wondered — is […]

I do government-adjacent work, so Friday afternoon I went out the front door to walk off my feelings and decided to turn right. As I neared the U.S. Capitol building, I started seeing people with going-home-from-a-protest energy (small groups, cheerful, heading away from major government buildings) and gangs of Architect of the Capitol staff cleaning […]

With California once again burning, I keep wondering, if those fires were coming our way, what would I save? I remember my cousin who, years ago, lost her house during a summer of flames; she’d been away from home when it burned, so there was no frantic effort to stuff the car with keepsakes. After […]

I had tickets to fly to LA at the end of the week for mountain lion research where I’d meet with wildlife biologists, follow cats in the Santa Monica mountains by radio collar telemetry, and take a tour of the nearly complete Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101. That plan went out the window with […]

I could never hack it as a farmer, and the thought of living as a hunter-gatherer evokes for me the feeling of being locked out of your house. But in the ancient and abandoned indigenous villages on the coast of British Columbia, there was a mode of food cultivation that really strikes a chord with […]

I wrote this post in 2019, when I was feeling prickly and uncertain–not too different than how I’m feeling these days. We do have a few more orchids now, although I still am not quite sure how to care for them. * I wake up this morning on the prickly side—or at least, I’m prickly […]

Lately I’ve been a bit lax about my camera trapping — dead batteries, neglected cameras, etcetera — but, last month, I did manage to check the rig I’d had set up for a while at our county’s friendly neighborhood carcass pile, where highway crews and hunters dump the sorry detritus of elk and deer, and […]

Last Friday, Sarah used “touchstone” as a metaphor. I think she uses the metaphor — you touch a stone and see its landscape in time — in a way that’s poetically off-center from touchstone’s usual meaning. Which is a thing that’s solid, grounded, and reliable and which is the way I’ve used “touchstone,” because I […]

Key:* = Pretty darn sure** = Scientists are making some educated guesses here Hundreds of millions of years ago during the Ordovician period, someone blorped and wiggled around in the shallow waters off Gondwana.* This someone didn’t have jaws or fins,** nor did they have utility bills or shoelaces.* Their name—as assigned by strangers who […]

This post first appeared in March 2023. I can’t wait to go to the beach again. Walking south along the beach towards Los Angeles this weekend, my friend and I were talking about all the arbitrary things that can alter a life’s trajectory, like where you’re born or if your parents went to college. As […]

Ed. note: Yes, certainly, parts of last year were pretty bad, yes, we noticed that. But not everything is terrible at all times in every way. And maybe, possibly, even probably, in this new year good things will happen. Craig: A Robbie Robertson song contains some of my favorite lyrics:Give us the strengthGive us the […]

Ed. note: Yes, certainly, parts of last year were pretty bad, yes, we noticed that. But not everything is terrible at all times in every way. And maybe, possibly, even probably, in this new year good things will happen. Becky: Maybe the Steller’s jays will hop back and forth on the pine outside the kitchen […]

* Text: If You Were Looking for a Sign, This Is It Yesterday was hard. The day before yesterday, hard, too. Somehow, something about today has made it soft. Not the unrelenting blankness of the December sky. Not the pain in my teeth, or my hands, or my aching heart. Not the electric bill. Not […]