Category: animals

Essentializing the animal: owls, war horses, and poetry.

Coming out of my office late this afternoon, I spotted a barred owl up in a tree outside the building, hunched against the trunk, squinching his eyes against the light and stoically standing off a pair of crows who were hassling him. I got concerned, especially when he was still there at dark a couple […]

Read more

Creature tracks.

What is it about a swimming animal that is just so endlessly delightful? Don’t know. But biking past the sloughs down near the river yesterday — yes, I did spend the first real sunny afternoon of spring up in the office, grading — I spotted the twin arrows of paddling-muskrat-wakes, heading away.  They spotted me […]

Read more

Pigs among the windfalls.

September, with the smell of fall caught and blowing around in the trees as Keats inevitably rustles inside my head: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….  One afternoon I take a break from my massive sabbatical writing project — which features among other things Keats (of course), John Cage, Marina Abramovic, yoga, gardening, pottery, snails, […]

Read more

Touching through the glass: animals, people, reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbahS7VSFs&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&version=3] Young parents laugh nervously as they film their child, whom they have placed up against the glass of a lioness’s cage in a zoo.  Behind the glass, the lioness is deadly serious:  she scratches and bites the barrier separating her from one good bite of food.  Incredibly, the father giggles, “Say hi, kitty, kitty.”  […]

Read more

A vermicular update — and some home composting lessons.

A couple of posts ago, you read about my new experiment in home vermicomposting. But since then I’ve learned there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it.  Basically, I now wish I’d started with one of these pictured here — a Worm Factory 360 — from the beginning rather than […]

Read more

Gettin’ worms.

The kitchen of your mama’s house in Alabama is not the best place to announce to your family – all human and animal doctors whose lives are full of horses, cattle, and dogs — that you are about to embark on home vermiculture. Especially if you phrase it, casually, “Hey, y’all, when I get back […]

Read more

Polar bears on a Coke can.

Today, just before Christmas, finishing up my grading and trying to cut down on the caffeine that’s one of the many things spiking my blood pressure this month, I picked up a can of Coke from the cooler in our student union.  Those who knew me in grad school, when I drank about a case […]

Read more

“The Higgs bison:” beasts, songs, bloops, and the creaturely deep.

The ghostly, homely faces of these beasts floated into my mind earlier last week when I misread a New York Times headline at the top of my webmail page. “Physicists will have to wait a little longer for Higgs Boson,” the tagline read.  Of course, I read it first as “Higgs Bison.” But considering what […]

Read more