On May 14 of 2008, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of Interior, followed the urgings of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall and placed the polar bear species (Ursus maritimus) on the endangered species list. Hunting bans were implemented to prevent the importing of hunted polar bear hides.
Before this, a powerful controversy had been [...]
Light’s rise sparks bright blooms:
birdsong, fields of it, vining–
spring’s first green flourish.
These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher, screeches [...]
In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the [...]
Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked. When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance.
Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such as [...]
Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.
This is the first installment of a five-part post.
Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer. Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves. Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads. Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, [...]
I love stories like this.
The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.
Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could [...]
A few years back, after attending a local storytelling festival, I wondered in this post what would happen if I released a story into public domain. I resolved to work up the nerve to let go what some might imagine to be my intellectual property, to “breathe it out” into the common atmosphere, where anybody [...]
by P. G. Karamesines
“Why do dragons keep maidens,” she asked,
“Not killing or eating them? Why hoard
Them in caves and sleep while foolish maidens
Weep, wringing jewelry and dabbing pale
Gowns at their eyes? It can bring no real pleasure.
Fell Dragon stokes inwardly its wizard fire
While Fair Maiden strums her lyre, lamenting
Yon Burnt Hamlet from whence she came.”
She [...]
As I walked out of a nearby canyon last week using the same trail where I reported having an encounter with a curious coyote, my nose detected gases given off by putrefaction. Somewhere nearby, bacteria were at work breaking down formerly living tissue to simpler matter, dispersing an organism’s worldly goods to its biological heritors.
To this we must all come. [...]