wildlife
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There are a number of words that bother me in common parlance. Let’s begin with Superpredator: The word “superpredator”, now almost exclusively used to report on wolf reintroduction in the American west, originated with a racially charged criminal theory in the 1990s designed to demonize juvenile offenders and imprison children for their entire lives. This…
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We moved. See blog post from about a week ago. Our new apartment overlooks open pasture and a wide, shallow lake and features a balcony that you can watch the local prairie dog colony from. Well, if you’re human. If you’re a dog, you can listen to them bark but I don’t think you can…
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I was ten years old. Tired, with a plate of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets on the plate in front of me in a bar after four days of camping in the woods. The TV showed a newscast, an aerial shot of a small boat on the water and a headline: “Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter, Dead at…
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At my sister’s wedding in September, I had a conversation with her grandmother-in-law about squirrels. She’s from Texas. She was baffled at the boldness and number of squirrels in my parents’ backyard, chirping from the fences, playing with the bluejays and sparrows at the neighbors’ birdfeeders. Later in the season, they devoured the pumpkins my…
from the pen of icarus blake 