Everyday Biophilia

It would be difficult to find an animal more adorable than a sea otter. We have all seen YouTube videos and nature documentaries showing otters doing everything in their lovability repertoire: scrubbing their faces, holding hands while napping in the kelp, and so on. The animals seem to have evolved to make human beings grin like happy fools. I suspect that if you took a poll, sea otters would out-cute human babies, and give kittens a run for their money. Not long ago, in need of some quiet, I turned to the live sea-otter cam maintained by Explore.org at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. All of the otters living at Monterey Bay are rescues that for one reason or another cannot be released into the wild, and watching them is always a peacefully enjoyable time. As they glided about their watery habitat, it occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about sea otters, and decided I wanted to learn more. So, I learned a few things. Like No Other Mammal In The Ocean The scientific name for a ...

The United States is home to some of the world’s most beautiful and cherished national parks. One of the loveliest is Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, home to the Brooks River and its world famous brown bears. In his new book, The Bears of Brooks Falls: Wildlife and Survival on Alaska’s Brooks River (Countryman Press, 2021), Mike Fitz takes us on a tour of the park, opening a window on one of our few remaining, largely unspoiled, and truly dazzling wildernesses. As a former, long-time National Park Service ranger at Katmai, Mike Fitz is the perfect person to escort us through the park and its extraordinary wildlife. From first page to last, he delivers a detailed, fascinating mosaic of Katmai, particularly the population of brown bears that, in his words, “make a living” fishing for salmon in the Brooks River. Katmai National Park and Preserve   Katmai is located about 300 miles SW of Anchorage, on the Alaskan Peninsula. It’s a remote destination, accessible only...

  Ever heard of Vitus Jonassen Bering? How about Georg Steller? No? Well, Bering was a Danish cartographer and Steller was a German naturalist. They lived in the early 1700s, and worked together for Imperial Russia, under whose auspices they led expeditions to map the Arctic coast of Siberia. In 1741, while they were sailing around between Alaska and Russia, in what would come to be called the Bering Sea, the ship carrying Bering and Steller ran aground during a storm, on the shores of what would come to be called Bering Island. (Vitus Bering was notoriously humble.) The island wasn’t inhabited (by humans), and was a pretty desolate place. (Vitus Bering) Having lost their stores during the wreck, the expedition members were in immediate need to food. The island didn’t offer much in the way of nourishment, but the water around it did, in the form of sea otters and, more importantly, an oceangoing mammal that would be named Steller’s sea cow. (Steller also had a very low opinion ...

  The International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has nine categories and criteria for the evaluation of Earth’s biodiversity: Not Evaluated, Data Deficient, Least Concern, Near Threatened, Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered, Extinct in the Wild and Extinct. With each passing day it seems more and more animals fall within the category of “Critically Endangered.” One of those animals is the diminutive vaquita ( Phocoena sinus ). The smallest member of the cetacean family, this tiny porpoise is the most critically endangered marine animal in the world. Population estimates put its numbers at a total of perhaps 10 individual animals. Vaquita live only in the northern Gulf of California, the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, making them the only porpoises that live in warm waters. Very little is known about them because, like other species of porpoise, they are extremely shy and flee (wisely) at the first sign of boats or other human activity. Scientists have been able...

That’s right. Animals are thieves. I said it, I meant it, and I won’t take it back. (Sit down, Skippy.) But just to be clear we are not talking about ordinary examples of animal thievery, like when your dog nicks some potato chips when your back is turned, or when a cat grabs some trinket off your desk and wiles away a few happy minutes batting it around the kitchen floor until it goes under the stove and you never see again. No, what we are talking about is animal thievery with intention . An animal sees something it wants, sorts through the particulars, then goes and gets it. Our larcenous little buddies pilfer a wide array of objects for reasons that run the gamut from the obvious, to the seemingly impertinent, to the unfathomable. Marauding Monkeys Long-tailed macaques in Bali have fairly recently perfected a new way of getting tourists to give them food: they steal their stuff and then trade it back to the tourist in exchange for treats. Such simian shenanigans are commonpla...