Donald Culross Peattie was a different sort of nature writer.
Nature
The fruiting bodies of Lycogala epidendrum • Photo by Benny Mazur (CC BY 2.0)
Duckweed • Photo by Patricia Barden (CC BY 2.0)
Under magnifier, scum is beautiful
“The angiosperms are the superstars of the plant world,” says Lynn Margulis in her ‘Five Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth.’
The Aran landscape • Photo by Herbert Ortner (CC BY 2.0)
The endless journey with ‘adequate steps’
Tim Robinson is an Englishman who went to Ireland’s Aran Island in 1972 to write, think, and otherwise jolt his life out of a London rut. In 1984, he moved across Galway Bay to Connemara, where he remains. His long sojourn in those rocky landscapes has led to several wonderful books and maps of surpassing loveliness.
A late-summer Monarch prior to migration • Photo © Tom Raymo
Accepting the holy as something natural
Last week I described a visit to the Chincua monarch butterfly sanctuary in the mountains of central Mexico. Each winter, tens of millions of monarchs from all over eastern North America congregate at Chincua, and a few other patches of nearby forest, to hibernate, feed, and breed.
Photo by Mark Timberlake on Unsplash
Of the poet, scientists, and blackbirds
Eight black crows arrayed in the sparse limbs of a leafless elm, set against a gray winter sky. Their iridescent feathers burned like eight black candles — spooky, mournful, Bergmanesque.
American red squirrel • Photo © Tom Raymo
Write good stories, not bad laws
Last weekend at the New England Aquarium Environmental Writer’s Festival, I was asked what I have been doing in this column for the past 17 years. What, I wondered, did “Science Musings” have to do with the environment?
A great blue heron takes to the air • Photo © Tom Raymo
Finding inspiration in a blue heron
If you have ever watched a jumbo jet take off you will know what I mean.
An abandoned village in the Bahamas • Photo by Venture Minimalists (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Nature takes back an island village
The abandoned village of Richmond Hill lies at the end of a forest track here, four miles from the nearest paved road on the swampy back side of the island, away from the white sand beaches and breezy ridges of Exuma Sound.
A Greater Antillean Boa • Photo by Jan P Zegarra (Public Domain)
Can’t fight phobia even in paradise
Every paradise has its snake, as Adam and Eve learned to their chagrin.
Illustration of Cortinarius torvus by Beatrix Potter
Barred from science
No children’s book author is more revered than Beatrix Potter.