Natural History

Guillermo, Felipe, and I agree; the western sandpiper at the far end of the mudflat is an old friend. We had captured, color-banded, and released him when he arrived in Punta Banda (on the Pacific coast of Baja California, Mexico) in late October three...

In a land scorched by sun and wind, exposed rock would seem an unlikely refugium for life of any kind. Yet even in the most hostile of climates, a single rock can provide a variety of living situations for microbiota adapted to life at the extremes....

Conservation is supposed to be about conservation, right? Say you want to save the last untrammeled ecosystem on the island of Saint Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. You've got an upland wilderness. You've got the island's last two really isolated...

From The Pony Fish's Glow and Other Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature, by George C. Williams. Copyright 1997 by George C. Williams. Reprinted by arrangement with BasicBooks. Many traditional religions foster attitudes that ought to have disappeared...

One natural phenomenon that has it all is the migration of animals-from turtles and cetaceans that traverse the oceans to the salmon and shad that return to their natal streams; from the herds of caribou that track the tundra to the birds of prey and...

For Joan Walsh, a biologist at the New Jersey Audubon Society's Cape May Bird Observatory, spring of 1997 was ominously quiet. By mid-May, the shores of Delaware Bay that Walsh frequently visits are usually packed, not with beachgoers but with throngs...

Galileo and friends taught us that there is more to observing than meets the eye. In 1603, Federico Cesi, the duke of Aquasparta, founded an organization that grew from uncertain beginnings to become the first scientific society in modern European history....

Hot Tuna My conceptual world has suffered a severe tremor with the arrival of your March 1998 issue and "Net Loss," Elliot Norse's review of Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean. The third paragraph informs me that the bluefin tuna is a warm-blooded...

Did cometary impacts deliver Earth's entire oceanic supply? From the looks of the many dry and unfriendly-seeming spots in our solar system, you might think that water, while plentiful on Earth, is a rare commodity in the galaxy. But of all molecules...

When scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began thinking seriously about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, they looked to Earth's own desert soils for some idea of what might exist on less hospitable...