A WOODCHUCK IS WOOLLY. Who knows what he thinks? He hibernates in his underground lair, a groundhog by any other name, his tail not quite reaching his nose. He slumbers all winter there, living off ...

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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 ...

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 ...

AFEW YEARS AGO, while living on the Diné Nation, I first heard a striking proclamation that rang through the community with profound urgency: “Tó éí íín´á!”—“water is life.” I saw these words in bold ...

THE GUITAR LINE UNFURLS with a kinetic, pulsing energy. Soft moans hover over the riff, both spooky and sensual. Then the synth slides in, drums steady the beat, and the song swells with the promise ...

HE IS HUNCHED DOWN feeding on the carcass of a newly dead bison by the northeast shore of Yellowstone Lake. He eats methodically, gratefully, his muzzle smeared with blood, his forearms and ruff ...

I WAS TAUGHT, AS A SCIENTIST, to think logically and empirically, rather than intuitively or spiritually.When I was at Cambridge University in the early 1960s most of the scientists and science ...

Ellen Wayland-Smith: You describe your book at one point as “a bridge between words—poetry—and the land, which have always been my two primal loves.” This question of language, and how to listen to/be ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

THE MORNING AFTER A white man murdered six Asian women, I ate five oranges. They were not dainty tangerines or pretty satsumas or festive clementines. These were unwieldy, bulging oranges, pockmarked ...