Wildlife

It’s a popular refrain here in central New Mexico come summer: The silvery minnow can hunker down, bury itself in a dry streambed and outlast drought. Whenever the river slows and its bed begins to dry, I’m inevitably informed that the Rio Grande has always dried, and the four-inch long minnow has always survived. This […]

I thought about the woman’s bones for a long time — what position they might have been in when they were abandoned and covered up, what had happened to her heart and her lungs as they slowly deteriorated. The cavity of her ribs and her chest, the now-hollow cavity of her thigh bones, that narrow […]

Early in May, I watched one of my most cherished forests burn. The flames and smoke were great to see. Fire is often seen as death and destruction for a forest, but here was a forest living with fire as an ecological process. Exactly 10 years ago, this old-growth ponderosa pine forest of the Deadwood […]

Here in Oregon, the dinosaurs are stirring. The brontosaurs of big timber, almost at their last gasp, are making one last power play, and it’s a WOPR, pronounced — how else? — “whopper,” which stands for Western Oregon Plan Revisions. What’s being revised are management plans for six Bureau of Land Management districts in western […]

A puppet show just finished a 20-year run in southwest New Mexico. I first attended in 1994, when a magazine sent me to the Gila National Forest to inspect damage grazing had done to habitat of Gila trout, our only endangered inland salmonid. Grazing allotments in the Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses had been leased […]

When the Bush administration announced plans to close ocean fishing ofchinook salmon along 700 miles of Southern Oregon and Northern Californiacoastline, many people in my hometown sneered their approval. With the exception of a brief, limited and most probably token fishing season last summer, Idaho’s upper Salmon River basin has been closed to salmon anglers […]