Category: Animals
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Taxidermy | Ellensburg, WA | February 2019 What scares you? Each of us faces fears that affect our lives — public speaking, heights and crowds, revealed secrets, big teeth on carnivores. Fear inhibits the spirit, hardens the heart, suffocates the soul. You’d find romance in Rome if you could steel your nerves to fly. I…
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Idle Hour | East Wenatchee, WA | March 2019 The publishing industry is flooded this spring by a wave of self-help titles on doing less. The books are a reaction, I suppose, to our increased pace of life — do more, do it faster — all juiced by the latest tech. In truth, experts say,…
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Resting Geese | East Wenatchee, WA | March 2019 The cold never hit hard this winter, and snow came late (February). Many flocks of Canada geese, mildly confused, chose to hang out here rather than sojourn south. They managed to adjust to frosty conditions, as we all did — waddling over icy patches, basking in…
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Steer | Ellensburg, WA | February 2019 It’s a cold wait, and sometimes long. But when the roper cuts him from the herd, the steer is all action — a straight-line blur to outrun the lasso. Roped or not, he then trots, all perky, into the holding pen where
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Jellyfish | Newport, OR | March 2019 Aliens float among us. Boneless, gelatinous, the jellyfish undulate a foot from my face as they propel across their private universe (a plexiglass cylinder). These unearthly creatures seem to radiate color, but aren’t. Instead, their translucent bodies
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Buffalo in Wildfire Smoke | Cle Elum, WA | 2018 “People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them … By 1895, there were only
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Arbor | Chelan Falls, WA | 2019 One complex biological system (a big mess of vines) provides perches for a batch of even more complex systems (flitting birds) while being observed by one of the most complex systems in the universe (shucks, that’s me). Trillions of specialized cells grouped into three very different organisms all…
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Snow Poodle | Twisp, WA | 2017 What’s to sniff in a frozen landscape? Our dog traces ghost scents left days before by wandering wildlife. Deer, coyotes, ravens, moles and stray cats have all written travel tales across the crunchy crust. And, as pooch owners know, every muzzle loves a good story. My own inhalations…
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14 on the Fly | East Wenatchee, WA | 2017 Before you rush to join the crowd, consider the benefits of hovering alone. You float free in a cloud of thoughts — your thoughts — without judgment or boundaries. Wacky ideas mix equally with
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Moth in Window | Pacific Beach, WA | 2017 “The way we experience the world around us is a direct reflection of
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