Lately

Check out my latest Bestiary microcolumn in Orion on the Blue Whale. WITH A HEART THE SIZE OF a piano tucked inside a two-hundred-ton body, the elusive blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest known animal to have ever inhabited Earth. If you are fortunate enough to see one careen into a great cloud of krill, it might be tempting to label such a hungry behemoth as a quintessential taker, but the truth is, in her ninety years of life a blue endows as much as she acq

Thank you to the fine curators of the Nautilus Book Awards, whose mission is to "celebrate and honor books that support conscious living and green values, wellness, social change, social justice, and spiritual growth."

Check out my latest Bestiary microcolumn in Orion on the Beaver. FROM A DISTANCE, North American beavers (Castor canadensis) are unassuming. In water, they keep a vague profile, low smudge trailing a veil of ripples. On land, back hunched in perpetual labor, they appear a hummock of brown fur, indistinguishable from a dark stump. You have to creep close to appreciate their bulk, to study that broad paddle tail, those webbed back feet. But do not be fooled by their portly coun

Art by Carrie Shryock I was recently pleased to learn that What Goes on Inside a Wolf Pack was honored with a Riverby Award recognizing exceptional nature books for young readers from the lauded John Burroughs Association (who happens to be celebrating their 100-year anniversary this spring)! "Winning books present perceptive and artistic accounts of direct experiences in nature and invite young readers to explore the natural world for themselves. They demonstrate respect f

Check out my latest Bestiary microcolumn in Orion on the Platypus. TO GAZE UPON A PLATYPUS is to witness a jumble of contradictions. With the furry, floppy body of an otter, a duck’s hard bill, and a rooster’s set of spurs (tipped with venom on the males!), the animal looks like a collaborative effort, a lark, the goofball product of a surrealist’s game of exquisite corpse come alive to waddle off a sketchbook page. For here is a mammal , who, in her tight riverbank burrow

Check out my latest Bestiary column in Orion on the Superb Lyrebird. HERE HE STRUTS OUT of the brush, clearing a stage, ready to flex. Behold his marvelous tail, a clutch of sixteen elaborate feathers—an array of skeletal plumes framed by a pair of thick, striped primaries—that rise and curve outward. Together, they mimic the shape of the bird’s namesake, that sweet scoop of a hand harp beloved by bare-assed cherubs and the god of music himself, Apollo, shining like the sun

Erica Berry, author of Wolfish , was kind enough to ask me about graphic storytelling, wolf-watching, community, and my new book What Goes on inside a Wolf Pack in this conversation .