First, get up in the middle of the night and drive through the freezing December cold to a wildlife refuge in New Mexico about an hour down the interstate. Then, meet a caravan of biologists and volunteers at an abandoned restaurant right off the highway. When everyone has arrived, follow the line of traffic into the refuge. After you pass through the second gate, abandon … Continue reading How to catch a wolf
That tiny dot in the photo is me, hiking across the prairie of Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota on vacation in September, channeling Laura Ingalls Wilder (whose books I devoured as a kid) and seeking out as much charismatic megafauna as I could. (Tatanka everywhere!) There’s something captivating about the American West; a longing that poet Emily Walters called … Continue reading West comes east
It’s hard to believe that three years have passed since I spent two weeks in Bar Harbor, Maine as part of the Johns Hopkins Summer Conference on Craft. As a kid, I was always thrilled to get out of school each June to play outside. But as a grownup who never gets her summers off, going to summer school as part of my graduate program … Continue reading The seabirds of summer
It was hard not to feel excited when the video footage landed in my inbox a few weeks ago. Researchers studying chimpanzees in the forests of Gabon’s Batéké Plateau National Park had captured footage of a solitary male lion on a remote camera – the first lion spotted in Gabon in 20 years. The national park was fairly young, established in 2002 as one of … Continue reading Success story or fluke? The forest lion of Gabon
As I wrote my recent article for High Country News, I felt torn. Like many conservationists, I value biodiversity and natural ecosystems for their own sake, regardless of any tangible benefit they provide to humanity. That’s the argument for saving nature that conservation icons going back more than 100 years have made to help protect America’s wilderness, parks, and wildlife –and the argument that has … Continue reading Expanding the conservation tent
