But, if you’re feeling like you could use some more quiet tenderness in your life and reading (who doesn’t these days?), try ...

Writer, naturalist, whale watcher, and longtime Orion contributor Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of several books of ...

I had come to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey to research a novel about a pair of amateur cryptozoologists who travel the ...

On the ground, my encounters with the habituated mother bear of yearling cubs were becoming increasingly tense. We were both visibly stressed by the presence of the other and on the defensive. The ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...

THE WILLOWS ARE SLEEPING, luminous in the shortening light. Frozen within them is the mandate for spring, which always comes. The four seasons are the basic code for the existence of all life. We have ...

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT cattle mutilations when a round of them popped up in Oregon. The details, I need to warn you, are graphic. In 2019, five bulls were found dead in a wooded area, fifteen miles from ...

LAST YEAR I RETURNED TO El Oasis, a Rarámuri community at the edge of Chihuahua City in northern Mexico, where I once lived while conducting fieldwork. This time I came not as a researcher but as a ...

BIGFOOT ISN’T REAL, but black bears are—that’s the subtext of a recent study by Dr. Floe Foxon mapping bear populations relative to cryptid sightings. That study, published in 2024, sparked my ...

LEAVING A GARDEN IS LIKE leaving a marriage—it’s an abandonment of the plan. The plan, which, in the perennial garden, extends beyond death. “When we were planning our first backyard perennial garden, ...