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Discover the Best Books
Love to wander the aisles of bookstores? Want to follow your curiosity and meet amazing books? You are in the right place. Above is the official intro to a noble new effort to bring readers and good books together, called Shepherd. I was honored to contribute my take on the The Best Books on Nature…
Read MoreFarewell to Merlin
FEBRUARY 5, 2022: Our merlin is back. She’s been appearing every so often for a couple months now, her muscular, falcon physique silhouetted dark against the blue skies. Over the last five winters she’s marked the seasons, here by late autumn from somewhere in the Canadian latitudes, gone by the early months of spring. It’s…
Read MoreMy Octopus Teacher
AGES AGO, I visited the invertebrate house of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. to meet Hercules. Hercules was the zoo’s resident giant octopus, whose first impression I would later record as “a fleshy confusion of serpentine limbs and baggy head, a tentacled wreckage with a disturbingly human eye peeking out from within.” There…
Read MoreTouched by a Shark
For a couple years as a kid I lived on the island of Key West, a bohemian U.S. outlier ninety miles north of Cuba. Key West by that time had become a sportfishing mecca, and come five o’clock a boy with time and no money could entertain himself by walking the docks as the charter…
Read MoreMason’s Blue Owl
Twelve years ago, not long after our move to West Virginia, Kathy and I spent a special evening hanging with our new friends, Brian and Sylvia Ellsworth. That night we met their teenaged son, Mason, an angelic, baby-faced, happy-go-lucky musician who politely schooled us rock-and-roll dinosaurs on the current music scene, and led songs around the campfire after dinner. Two days later, Mason suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident.
Read MoreWhen Big City Meets Big Kitty
It’s been a few weeks now since our weary COVID gaze was momentarily enlivened by the sighting of a cat. For two days in mid-June we tuned in as a wild mountain lion walked the streets of San Francisco. We followed him by way of citizen smartphones and security cameras, popping up in the city…
Read MoreOwl Time
There’s a predator lurking, just around the corner of the house. The cardinal bird says so, his excited chipping as clear a warning as a finger tapping on my shoulder. Toward all the fussing I follow, tiptoeing barefoot through the grass. And there, just a few feet away from the sentinel cardinal, is the subject…
Read MoreEarth Optimism Summit 2020
Cool to be part of the Smithsonian’s Earth Optimism Summit 2020, which wraps up today. Feel free to drop in on my session, where I talk about–what else?–predators! That is, predators and their ecological role in the web of life. And why in these scary times of the coronavirus pandemic, showing more respect and admiration…
Read MoreMore shenanigans from Manhattan on ‘Walker’s’ march on the Big Apple
Walker meets Uncle Leo of NY Public Library, en route to Greenwich gig
Read More‘Walker,’ star of Heart of a Lion, invades The Big Apple!
‘Walker,’ star of Heart of a Lion, was spotted crossing the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday, destination unknown. There are rumors, however, that he will be making a few more appearances down the road in Connecticut over the next couple days.
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