At first I didn’t know what woke me up. The night was silent and nothing but a faint warble of tree crickets could be heard outside my tent. For a few of minutes I just lay there, foggily trying to figure out what disturbed my sleep but soon started to drift off. Suddenly, there it…
Category: Behavior
Sweat the small stuff
Recently I have been processing some of the 18,000+ photos I took during a recent trip to Mozambique, and yesterday one image caught my eye. It shows a large ground beetle carrying a dead cicada. I shot it rather casually one night in front of my tent in Gorongosa, and immediately forgot about it. But…
Mozambique Diary: How to kill an assassin
I often lament the fact that humans are freakishly gargantuan next to nearly all other animals, and thus unable to appreciate the beauty and complexity of the majority of smaller life forms that share the world with us. Yet, at the same time I am thankful that we do not need to contend with the…
Only in America
I first learned about the existence of periodical cicadas when I was a young boy, still living in z Old Country. The idea that an insect could develop underground for 17 years was crazy enough, but the fact that after all that time every individual within the population emerges at once in a synchronized, massive…
When life gives you lemons
Last weekend I drove with a couple of friends to Delaware to watch what surely must be one of the most amazing natural spectacles in North America, the annual mass spawning of Atlantic horseshoe crabs. I do it almost every year, and over time the eight hour drive from Boston to Delaware Bay has become…
Mozambique Diary: Somebody has to clean this mess
A friend of mine once compared holding a dung beetle in your hand to kissing a dog on the snout – both feel kind of good, until you think of the last thing they have probably been rubbing against. At least with dogs there is some room for other options, but there is no such…
The Smaller Majority 