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Review - Princeton Field Guides : Carnivores of the World

01/15/2019

I have believed for some time that there is a beauty in a Princeton field guide that transcends the level of detail and expertise that many other guides provide their users, and the Princeton Field Guides: Carnivores of the World is no exception. In fact, its publication may even set Princeton’s own personal benchmark that much higher. Each of the 250 species profiled in the book is richly illustrated, described and then explored through the subsections of ‘distribution and habitat’,
The Year of the Fox

01/09/2019

Photo - D. Gordon E. Robertson Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported “Happy New Year.” The Chinese couple spin their stools to face me as I get even to the counter where they are sitting, so trusting, their backs always to the door. We are at the point now, just a week on from the first day of 2019, that these three words have begun to lose quite a bit of their poignancy, but not here, not with this couple. They live in a world bound by their challenges, but likewise
Regarding Darwin's theory of Sexual Selection

11/28/2018

Writing in the book from Oxford University Press Sexual Selection, authors Marlene Zuk and Leigh W. Simmons note that the theories Charles Darwin delineated in Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex were challenging to his audience of both scientific and general readers. The authors write: “While competition among males for the right to mate with a female seemed reasonable enough to Darwin's Victorian contemporaries, virtually none of them could swallow the idea that females – of any
National Ocean Exploration Forum: All Hands On Deck

11/16/2018

Time worked in a double fold way during the 2018 National Ocean Exploration forum at the MIT Media Lab in Boston. The days passed quickly, and yet it feels like so much was achieved in those hours that clock time lost its relevancy, and instead took on the quality of both the movement of the tide and of the quick dancing steps of the shorebird. The theme of the conference was 'All Hands on Deck', and that phrase speaks to one of the most important issues facing us, for the ocean needs all of
A Trip to Another World

10/17/2018

The woods at Jacobsburg State Park are surprisingly quiet in spite of all the cars parked in the lot. Birds are heard but rarely seen as we walk from one environment, a deciduous forest, to another, a coniferous one. Leading us is one of the few birds we do see on this day - a white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis). According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website: "White-breasted Nuthatches are birds of mature woods and woodland edges. They’re particularly
Learning About Monocultures at SCBI

10/09/2018

A heavy mist pillows and blunts the top of the mountains outside Front Royal, Virginia. Yesterday my son and I rode the foothills of these mountains, our horses gauging their footing on the wet, muddy slopes as we let our hands sit forward on their necks, trusting them to gauge their own steps on what was, to us, unfamiliar land. We rode across the now obscured tracks of horsemen from both sides of the Civil War, as well as those of George Washington. We learned about history on that muddy
Sometimes you ride the horse...

10/02/2018

It is the first really cool day of fall but the morning chill mostly burns off by afternoon. By the time I get to the barn, it is almost too warm for a long-sleeve shirt, but not everything is as it seems. There is still something in the air that whispers, just barely hints, at autumn. Maybe it is the birds, jays and grosbeaks that fly over in a thin migratory stream. Duncan, the quarter horse that I ride, is in an interesting mood. There are no hitches in grooming and saddling him, and I feel
Tara Expeditions: A place to begin, a home to return to

09/24/2018

There is little about this late September sky in New York that would make you think about Georgia during the Civil War. The gray clouds had been gathering through the night, thickening all morning, and lacking a consensus on whether they should openly downpour of move along, seem to have agreed now on a meager drizzle. Rather it is a French ocean research vessel that the people who cluster on the dock hoping tour, a schooner whose name references the plantation in Gone With the Wind, that
The autobiographies of snails

09/19/2018

Aristotle gets short shrift in contemporary writings about animal issues. He is seen as the progenitor of Descartes' ideas about the animal as machine, devoid of the divine light of reason that sets humans apart from other animals. Descartes isn't kind in his writing to animals, equating them with machines. This criticism of Aristotle is not completely untrue, but should perhaps be tempered with a bit of understanding. Aristotle was not just expanding the field of biology, he was in a very