Wrangel Island carries a certain profoundness, a divine story of a different sort. Life here is postapocalyptic, a kind of rebound. It portends the future. My sponsor is Alexander…

Dead animals were scattered across the steppe in front of us. Up to the horizon. Thousands of them. That was the moment we understood that we were observing a mass mortality of catastrophic…

On the morning of Friday Aug. 6, 1852, Alfred Russel Wallace was summoned to the deck of the brig Helen. The boat was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and Wallace had already been…

Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery…

Cephalopods loom large in our cultural mythos. Their long, sucking arms, large, unblinking eyes, and the sheer size of species like the giant squid have creeped us out since at least…

Elephants When I sat down with Iain Douglas-Hamilton at his home in Nairobi to learn how he went from deploying the first radio collars on elephants in 1968 to deploying the first…

On a recent rainy morning in Brooklyn, Tom Stephenson, smiling and serious, dressed in khaki quick dry and a baseball cap with a Cerulean warbler insignia, stepped into Prospect Park,…

Suppose you wanted to build the perfect dog from scratch. What would be the key ingredients in the recipe? Loyalty and smarts would be musts. Cuteness would be as well, perhaps with…

A little more than a decade ago, Mike Mendl developed a new test for gauging a laboratory rat’s level of happiness. Mendl, an animal welfare researcher in the veterinary school at…

In winter, the knots come by the thousands to feast on the riches in the intertidal mudflats of the Wash. These medium-size wading birds are rather dull and unprepossessing in appearance,…