“Nature” has always been important to me.  Since childhood, all things animal and plant have been a source of fascination, enjoyment, and even worship.  As a kid, I went off to the fields and woods within walking distance of my house near the Ohio State University campus to collect butterflies and other insects.  By the […]

Sitting quietly just above the floodplain of a prairie stream spilling from the foothills, birds dash in and out of willow – yellow warbler, gray flycatcher, little brown jobs (unidentified little birds flitting by), a spotted towhee screeching over my shoulder, red-tailed hawk floating on winds aloft. I have a 500mm lens on my lap, […]

Take just one step outside – there is overwhelming beauty that literally hits your face. Ginormous annual sunflowers block the door so you have to awkwardly maneuver around them. Once you make it past the sunflowers, there are even more beautiful flowers, in the prairie surrounding the house. I’m one of the Hubbard Fellows with […]

Living in the time of Covid-19 has meant more family walks on nearby prairies — Pioneers Park, Nine Mile, Spring Creek Prairie. We have to get out of the house some way, but walking the concrete streets of our suburban development is not nearly enough to satiate our hunger for birds and butterflies. Even though […]

“The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.” – Teddy Roosevelt   The cold mountain air strikes my face as I crawl out of my tent during the pre-dawn hours of the morning. I stand, gazing across a vast alpine landscape, the jagged peaks on the horizon etching […]

Throughout the pandemic, I have found myself connecting with nature through different means. Like many people who work in the conservation field, I find solace in the outdoors and that’s where I retreat when life is stressful and hard to handle. Lucky for me, through my current job, I live on a nature preserve and […]

Social distancing comes easy at the Pathfinder Ranches in Wyoming.  Before COVID-19, we used to call it riding fence, getting snowed in, or simply having a rural route address off Highway 220.  A quarantine was known as seclusion, we referred to isolation as remoteness, and stay-at-home orders happened when you got in trouble with mom […]

A Reflection on Connecting to Mother Earth from an Urban Native Traditionalist Living in Lincoln Nebraska Recollection…  I remember the place where my grandparents lived on the then outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska. Their address was 445 Adams St. Their home was a two-story farmhouse that sat on the corner of two gravel roads just a […]

Back in March, I remember the feeling of the world spinning out of control. What initially seemed like a sensationalized hype was rapidly turning out to be a real and serious crisis. On the weekend of March 28, as news and conversation became nothing but COVID, I went cross country skiing high up northern Colorado’s […]