Author: bwren

BooMan’s story about where you live got me thinking about lightning bugs. I moved around a lot when I was growing up and lightning bugs were a part of the landscape in a number of the places I lived. Especially Pittsburgh,...

High Summer. We are past the Solstice into the time of heat and drought. Leaves fade, the air is tinged with yellow. Large Geum and Tiarella, the last of the wildflowers, are brittle and dry now, curling themselves back into the...

I’ve found it hard to settle into nature writing this week. There’s too much news out there – too many bombs, too many dead, too many lies, too many stone walls thrown up to hide atrocities that continue to be...

I love my field guides. Some were gifts, some I found in used bookstores, garage sales, dumpsters. They speak to me of different times and different places. Places and times where flocks of Passenger Pigeons darkened the air and...

People have been documenting the natural word since the first human figured out how make some kind of representative scrawl. Think about the cave painters of Europe, of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton. Of Darwin and Einstein. Of...