Author: Frances Monroe

If you remain motionless long enough, you can hear them before you see them on a specific corner in Pasadena. The sound of traffic and the rustle of palm fronds are interrupted by a sudden outburst of sharp, overlapping calls. Then a flash of bright green appeared overhead, with six, eight, or even a dozen birds flying across the sky with an almost reckless assurance. They are red-crowned parrots, and their presence was not intended. These birds, which peaked in the 1970s, came to the Los Angeles basin as pets from eastern Mexico. A few got away. A few were…

The males appear each spring before the Wyoming basin is completely illuminated. Dozens of them emerge from the sagebrush in the dark, puffing their white chest feathers into an almost theatrical appearance and spreading their spiky tails wide. Their yellow throat sacs make a rhythmic pop when they expand and contract; researchers have found that this sound can travel almost a mile across an open space. It’s among the most amazing things one can see on this nation’s public land. Additionally, it is occurring less frequently than it formerly did. Since 1965, the two-foot-tall greater sage-grouse, a symbol of the…

Standing on flat, featureless farmland in eastern England and being informed that you are, technically, at the bottom of what was once a vast and teeming freshwater sea can be subtly disorienting. With long stretches of drained clay soil, drainage ditches that cut arrow-straight lines across the horizon, and hardly a tree in sight, the Fens of Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk appear to be industrial agriculture at its most productive. They don’t appear to be the richest freshwater wetland in the British Isles, but that’s precisely what they were before centuries of drainage transformed them into something completely different. Depending…

There is a photograph making its way around conservation circles right now that is hard to shake. Taken in the Chubut province of Argentina, it shows roughly a dozen dead pumas and foxes — strung upside down along a rural fence, limp, their bodies arranged in a row that somehow feels deliberate. The photographer, Darío Podestá, called it “The Silence of the Innocents.” It placed second in the Last Wild Places category at this year’s seventh Patagonia Photo Contest. Runner-up. Which means something even more unsettling edged it out. That tension — between Patagonia’s jaw-dropping natural beauty and the increasingly…

Owl watching requires a certain level of patience. Not the contemplative type that nature documentaries idealize. Something less comfortable: standing motionless on a narrow forest trail in almost complete darkness, hoping your headlamp battery lasts while you listen for a sound that might or might not come. Most tourists come to Bohol because of the tarsiers or the Chocolate Hills. Both are worthy of the focus. After the tour vans depart and the souvenir shops close, however, a different Bohol emerges, one that belongs to moths, flying lemurs, and owls that have mastered the art of navigating a forest that…

Somewhere in the American West, a peregrine falcon nest that had been active for years is abandoned along the edge of a remote canyon. No pair circling overhead at dusk, no eggs, no chicks. The absence was quietly noticed by the rangers who were keeping an eye on it, much like when you notice a stopped clock. At first, there was no alarm, just a sense that something wasn’t right. It’s the kind of disappearance that goes unreported. However, it fits a pattern that investigators have been following for many years. The illicit trade in raptors, including gyrfalcons, hawks, and…

Somewhere in a Lagos market, tilapia is arranged on a shelf in the midday sun without any refrigeration, and a fan a few feet away is doing very little. A suspicious strain of Listeria that was removed from a shipment of leafy greens is being subjected to whole genome sequencing by technicians in a Dutch cold storage facility a few thousand miles north. The contrast is almost too sharp. However, it accurately depicts the current state of the global food system, which is both dangerously exposed in one area and brilliant and sophisticated in another. There isn’t just one outbreak…

A particular type of discovery can halt you in your tracks. It was a quiet, almost unbelievable moment of recognition rather than a dramatic revelation or a front-page crisis. That’s probably the most accurate description of what happened recently at RSPB Middleton Lakes in Staffordshire when a staff member or volunteer focused their binoculars on a wading bird and saw a recognizable pattern of colored rings on its legs. It was an avocet. The rings conveyed an amazing tale. The bird was only 36 years old when it was fitted as a nestling at RSPB Titchwell in Norfolk on July…

The low rustle of sage, the far-off clink of rock against rock, and the abrupt, sharp call of a blue-and-gray bird announcing itself before you’ve even noticed it all contribute to the unique silence that descends upon scrubland in the early morning. The American Scrub-Jay is not a timid animal. Researchers have compared its memory to that of certain primates, and it is assertive, territorial, and surprisingly intelligent. However, it is unable to get past nine feet of steel bollard fencing with four-inch gaps. And that seemingly minor restriction is starting to take on a much more serious appearance. Due…

Even after you’ve scrolled past a certain photo, it continues to stick in your mind. There was no face to be seen. No delicate skin or fabric texture. Even though it’s just a shape, such as a person standing in a doorway or a figure in motion against a fiery orange sky, you can still feel it more than ten times more technically detailed photographs. That durability isn’t coincidental. It is the outcome of a very conscious decision to withhold. That decision is becoming more and more common among contemporary photographers and visual directors. Low-key lighting, classical chiaroscuro, or simply…