Nature (Version 2.0)
It was when he first heard the call of a red-winged blackbird in the hills north of Fairbanks that John Adams knew something was up. This was a bird he recognized from the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. It was not one he expected to see in the boreal forest only a few dozen miles from …
Continue reading "Warmed up, Flooded out, and Pissed Off: Climate Change Becomes Personal"
The attractant made me gag. We had just finished setting up the motion-activated camera in the snowy Montana woods. We were putting the finishing touches to a site that we hoped might lure in an elusive lynx or fisher. The final task was to suspend from nearby trees a couple of small sponges soaked in …
Continue reading "Camera Traps and Lynx in the Age of Humans"
The bloody standoff was over in just a couple of seconds. The old wolf lunged at the cow elk’s neck, twisting his jaws at just the right second to deceive the elk about his trajectory. Offered just a glimmer of an opening, he clamped down with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure on her throat. In …
The old hunter leaned on his truffle-digging tool and took a drag on his cigarette. “Duemila lupi,” he said. Two thousand wolves. He scanned our astonished faces and then looked down at the dirt and shook his head, not even trying to conceal his disgust. We were standing in a young oak forest in Umbria …
