Wildlife & Nature Articles
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"It seemed an act of unfaithfulness, to trick those birds out of the sky, teasing them down from their rivers of wind. We looked like disgruntled birds of prey ourselves, fingertips balancing binoculars, elbows resting on knees or held out to the sides like partially folded wings. It was like a police stakeout: the camouflaged blinds, the cryptic whispers, the biologists talking to each other via walkie-talkies clipped to their collars. Time and time again I wanted to rest my eyes, my arms, but I stayed at the narrow Plexiglas slit in the blind as long as I could, a zealous acolyte, training my eyes on the far away wind, hoping."
"The horses stand in pairs or grouped together in threes. Appaloosas, Paints, Quarter Horses, they bow their heads, thinking their horsey thoughts. When the wind comes out of the Bob Marshall Wilderness it blows over fields of alfalfa, and if the horses have a mind to, they set out against the wind, testing it with their shoulders and breasts. They beat their hooves against earth and hear it drum back and they smell the distant snow. If they had eyes with sight in them they would surely look up and see the blowing fields, the mountains, this selfsame snow. But these horses have no eyes with sight in them — some have no eyes — and when darkness falls it falls no differently than does the afternoon light."
"Tabouli. Catlin Hill said the bear scat she collected the previous day had smelled like tabouli, and to prove it she’d passed the Ziploc bag of fresh bear droppings around the room where, one by one, each of four noses was inserted, a deep draft of the heady aroma inhaled and the bag passed on. At the completion of its round, all four noses wagged in agree- ment. Tabouli it was. And the next sample was opened."
"I wasn't prepared for the leopard-like stalk, the owl-eyed intensity of his stare, nor the sudden wild, reckless charge. One moment George Bumann— bespectacled, thirty-something, eminently polite and cheerful—would be calmly walking beside me, and the next minute be bounding over deadfalls and careening through wild- flowers, weaving and leaping, waving a mist net over his head. Even more astounding was moments later to find myself in an identical state, running pell-mell hither and yon, tripping-stumbling-falling-getting up, chasing what can only be described as a living piece of tissue paper gone haywire."