Category: nature

La Vie en Rose

Text of a bit I wrote on what it means to be alive, selected as a notable essay of 2019 in Best American Essays 2019, edited by Rebecca Solnit.

Atelopus

Isn’t this a fine-looking fellow? He’s Atelopus, a newly discovered species of fluorescent psychedelic frog, found in Suriname. (Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana, is north of Brazil on the…

Alameda Manzanita on Sobrante Ridge

Sobrante Ridge Regional Botanic Preserve, on the site of a former cattle ranch, occupies a space more or less surrounded by the suburban East Bay community of El…

Bay Area biomes

I’ve completed a brief survey of Bay Area plant communities over at Frisco Vista. The Bay Area topic suits me because I’ve accumulated a bunch of photos from…

Zooming in on a snowflake

I don’t have much to say about this, except it’s, well, cool.

Rampaging Sea Lions

What’s making the sea lions cranky? Frisco Vista, a new site devoted to San Francisco travel (what they’re building is so new they’re still working on the foundation)…

More Bad Ministration

So the Bushies appointed a guy who doesn’t believe in family planning to be head of the agency in charge of family planning. Well, what’s new, the outgoing…

Ecobungling, 19th century style

This handsome fellow is an Indian Mongoose (called manakuke in Hawaiian). Seventy-two mongooses were introduced into Hawaii in 1872 in an effort to control rats that had arrived…