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 [...]
June 2, 2009. I hiked into Crossfire Canyon via Coyote Way. The morning had a warmth to it I didn’t feel while I walked topside through currents of wind blustering north out of some rise of weather. But as I followed the trail down into the canyon the breezes thinned. Then holes formed in them, [...]
Last Saturday I attended a meeting of SE Utah writers that the Utah Arts Council held in Moab. This meeting followed a reading that the Moab Poets and Writers—a group specializing in nature writing—sponsored the night before, a reading in which yours truly participated. It was a pleasant and interesting series of events all around, but something happened during [...]
Saturday, June 13. As I was coming up out of Crossfire I heard voices. Much has happened lately in our small, southeast Utah town, so I was curious about who might be coming into the canyon. I saw a woman on the rocks above me, well off the trail, turning back in response to a [...]
[Greenfrog, aka Sean, is a piquant concoction of Mormonism, Buddhism, and Lawyerism living in the Denver, Colorado area. He describes himself as an amphibious creature who "breathes Mormon air and swims Buddhist waters, both quite happily." I became acquainted with him through his comments on posts at A Motley Vision. Field notes he contributed to some of my posts (see here, and here, scroll [...]
I’ve been thinking about shaming language, rhetoric meant to motivate others to action by attempting to arouse feelings of guilt, unworthiness, or disgrace —how unhealthy it is, not just for people’s psychological well-being but also for the environment. So I thought I’d run a couple of posts about how using guilt to motivate folks to change their behavior toward the earth and its natural [...]
From time to time, someone asks why I don’t write about the meaner, nastier side of nature, especially the predator-prey drama. Until I go on that man-eating African lion-hunting trip or bag me an Alaskan grizzly or happen to be on hand when a puma takes down a mule deer buck, I just don’t have much to offer on [...]
The Ellen Meloy Fund has awarded their grant of $2000 to Amy Irvine, author of Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, to support her work on her upcoming book, Terra Firma. This is the fund’s fourth annual grant.
She competed for this grant last year, too, when the award went to Joe Wilkins.
Since then, [...]
(On “Pond at Thompson’s Station” by J. Kirk Richards)
by Tyler Chadwick
The sun has been misplaced.
Or, if you’d like to get more
Biblical, it’s returned
to the dove’s abyss—or
was that Milton? I can’t be sure
as I dance so near the beginning
with words so supple they
bend into themselves until
only the landscape remains:
the field flushed white, hills
seduced into bed
by cloud [...]
by P. G. Karamesines
Mountains and evening: aspen leaves
Pale as moth wings,
Reclaiming the wood.
The car clove spring.
A flock of yellow petals, heads hung—
I wanted to stop,
But seeing you, said nothing.
You were not much in your face,
Your words, better remembering
Some breathtaken childhood
On this exalted road.
On the peaks, winds blew
Clouds to dust
In parching cold.
We rode through green flush [...]