tales from the wild metropolis
I'll bet you'd recognize this fella even if you've never met face-to-face. He's a night owl, a lounge lizard straight out of Central Casting, complete with rakish Salvador Dali mustache and goatee. He's been hanging around the dimly lit watering holes of cities, suburbs, and sylvan landscapes all across North America for as long as... Continue Reading →
The Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm, btw) are generally given credit for publishing the first collection of fairy tales. I hate to quibble, but Mother Nature is the OG spinner of stories full of abandonment, alchemy, metamorphosis, maturity quests, enchanted slumbers, and awakenings. Read closely, and you'll discover that folksy sagas don't use forests, meadows,... Continue Reading →
Big things come in small packages, we're told... and if you'd like some evidence to support that theory, boy-howdy, have I got a potent little parcel for you! Measuring 3-4" (8-11 cm) from beak to tail-tip, and tipping the scale at 0.1-0.3 oz (4-8 g), less than 2 cents worth of copper, the Golden-Crowned Kinglet... Continue Reading →
Strolling through Lafayette Park early one evening, I took note of the usual suspects distributed along the edge of the centerpiece man-made lake as they waited patiently for red-and-white bobbers to disappear below the surface. The fisher-folk are a common fixture here — the reservoir is stocked by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) every... Continue Reading →
Sleep is gaining new respect among human health researchers. They've observed correlations between 6-7 hours of quality shut-eye and longevity, improved mood and memory, as well as restoration of immune, nervous, skeletal, and muscular systems. But getting enough sleep is a challenge in the modern era of artificial lighting and smart devices that PING! their... Continue Reading →
Enter the term "engineering marvels" into your favorite search engine and you'll see there's some debate over the Top 10 but several projects always seem to hit the mark, such as Dubai's Palm Islands, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, the Chunnel connecting England and France, the International Space Station, and the Internet. They're all... Continue Reading →
As you might imagine, I was caught completely off-guard when, strolling through the shire one evening, a dashing young prince in the guise of a Blanchard's cricket frog (Acris blanchardi) bounced out of the shadows and onto the path before me, demanding a kiss.
Picasso was feeling low. Following the suicide of his friend and occasional roommate, the painter Carles Casagemas, Pablo plunged into a rock-bottom depression that lasted more than 3 years. During this time (1901 to 1904), the vividly extroverted artist faded from the Paris art scene to focus on a series of austere, melancholy, and eventually... Continue Reading →
Next-Door Nature 