Natural History Journal

Fall evenings are fine times to wile away the encroaching hours of darkness by perusing works of great naturalists and conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold.  Tucked at the back of his well-known book,  A Sand County Almanac , are two of Leopold's short essays, The Land Ethic and Marshland Elegy .  Though written over 70 years ago about the marshes of Wisconsin, where Sandhill Cranes breed, Marshland Elegy could just as easily have been written about their winter home in the wetlands and farmlands of California's Great Central Valley. Leopold begins his Elegy with the poetic prose for which he is so beloved, painting the kind of word pictures I love to get lost in. "A dawn wind stirs on the great marsh.  With almost imperceptible slowness it rolls a bank of fog across the wide morass.  Like the white ghost of a glacier the mists advance, riding over phalanxes of tamarack, sliding across bogmeadows heavy with dew.  A single silence hangs f...

As the conservationist Aldo Leopold once wrote, "There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot." I am one who cannot. A rare encounter with a very special mammal recently left me pondering this idea, the notion that living in touch with nature adds something profound to the value of our human existence, that my life would be sorely lacking if I had not grown up with one foot in the wild, and didn't live that way still. An American badger, watching me and thinking badger thoughts, while I watched him and marveled at the profoundly positive effects of a life lived in harmony with nature. As a kid, my parents took me all over the western half of the U.S., traveling, hiking and exploring.  Today, my husband and I often venture out together, for little reason other than simply to enjoy being in nature and to see what we can see.  From massive humpback whales, elephant seals and dolphins in the Pacific, to bears, bobcats and pika in the Sierra,...

The season of long, dark, cold evenings seems to be upon us, even though our autumnal afternoons remain beautifully warm.  Additionally, for the last few weeks I've been battling some sort of nasty virus accompanied by a most persistent cough. As a result, I've been spending more time than usual indoors, my birding adventures limited to watching the birds that visit my backyard feeders.  But the upside, I suppose, is that I've had a chance to do plenty of reading. Over the last two evenings, I enjoyed reading Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (which is not long), along with a couple of his essays on conservation.  He writes of the natural world in such beautiful poetic prose that is somewhat old-fashioned and entirely enchanting - I highly recommend his work! In the late 1940's, naturalist and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote in his essay The Land Ethic , "It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect...