Nature & Wildlife
With the end of October near and Halloween decorations almost everywhere you look, you might be wondering why certain animals are so often featured as we approach the spookiest holiday. Why do plastic owls decorate lawns, and fake bats hang from every nook and cranny?
Nature & Wildlife
You’ve no doubt heard the phrase “size matters,” used today quasi-humorously in almost every imaginable context in which the size of a particular object—animate or inanimate—is discussed. For example, one ESPN Classic article by writer Mike Puma on the racehorse Seabiscuit was titled Size Doesn’t Matter.
Nature & Wildlife
When people are deciding where to live, factors such as a community’s cost of living, employment opportunities, ease of transportation, and proximity to family and friends are usually considered on a somewhat equal basis. It turns out that for other mammals, the process is a bit more straightforward.
Travel Tales
We were sitting quietly, the two of us, on a log in the forested and tall-grass wilds of Alaska’s Lake Clark National Park and Preserve. Here, along the Cook Inlet coastline, are mountains, marshes, rivers, trees and lands that come together to make a good home for bears.
Conservation
There are many types of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and it seems that almost every day, we learn something more about them.
Alaska
Alaska’s Chinitna Bay on Cook Inlet near Lake Clark National Park and Preserve is the very heart of coastal brown bear country, according to the National Park Service. And now, having visited it, I can say I wholeheartedly agree.
Conservation
If you look at a U.S. $1 bill today, you’ll find an image of an eagle holding arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other.
Antarctica & Arctic
American environmentalist, historian and novelist Wallace Stegner called our national parks “the best idea we ever had.” In 1983, he wrote: “National parks are … absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”
Nature & Wildlife
Teaching was once considered a uniquely human behavior. Today, however, scientists recognize a small but diverse group of species who have the ability to act as instructors.
Conservation
Found along 25% to 30% of the world’s coastlines, kelp forests are the most extensive marine vegetated ecosystems in the world. A type of seaweed, kelp attaches to rocky surfaces on the ocean floor and—like terrestrial plants and trees—grows upward toward the sunlight. Some experts even call kelp “the sequoias of the sea.”
Nature & Wildlife
Haunting photos and mysterious stories of the stone statues—or moai (pronounced mo-eye)—on Easter Island have probably fascinated you since you were a child.
Nature & Wildlife
Songs have power. That was never made clearer to me than when I recently read about some new discoveries involving the songs of animals. Songs can lead us to find rare wonders.
