Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, […]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, I’d like a word—and bring along Henry David, too, because September is National Botfly Month, at least for white-footed mice in the Brockport Woods.

In early May I heard Leslie Jamison read at Brockport’s Writers Forum. Jamison, who has struggled with intoxication, described her addiction as “an attempt to find luminosity in things that refused to yield much glow.”

Recently, I had a week of fieldwork that illustrates the highs, lows, and in-betweens that comprise most scientific projects. Research proceeds in fits and starts, whether we’re talking high-energy particle physics, molecular genetics, or (most critically) Inyo Mountains salamanders, as during my week of contrasts: Day 1—My goal was to investigate a possible salamander locality […]

Recently, my son and I discovered a “new” population of Inyo Mountains salamanders, perhaps the twenty-first documented locality. It was in an unexpected situation—a seep just eighty yards long, which we reached after a long walk up an otherwise waterless drainage. A thin trickle of water slipped through a rank growth of grass and goldenrod, […]