In September 2021, Russian wildlife photographer Dmitry Kokh and his team were sailing around the wild and remote Chukotka Peninsula in Russia's extreme northeast. They were hoping to visit Wrangel Island, a well-known gathering place for polar bears, when the weather turned.
"We faced a heavy storm, with super-strong wind and waves, and we tried to find a place to shelter from the storm because the boat was small," Kokh recalls. They sheltered near the rocky shore of a small, uninhabited island called Kolyuchin, home to an abandoned Soviet-era weather station – and made an unexpected discovery.
In 1992, Hurricane Andrew, one of the most devastating tropical cyclones in U.S. history, ravaged Elliott Key, Florida. “Most of the island was covered in seawater, and about a quarter of the trees were either toppled or completely broken,” says Sarah Steele Cabrera, a biologist at the University of Florida. “There was not a leaf to be seen.”
At the time, conservationists fretted that the enormous hurricane was going to wipe out the last of the island’s Schaus’ swallowtails (Papilio aristodemus), a species of endangered black-and-yellow butterfly native to southern Florida and now found only on Elliott Key and nearby Key Largo. And the butterfly’s numbers on the island did take an initial hit from the storm. But only four years later, much to scientists’ surprise, the population jumped dramatically. Now, a 36-year-long dataset shows that Schaus’ swallowtails saw similar post-hurricane population bumps after two subsequent hurricanes: Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017.
As a nonflier and a travel writer, I spend a lot of time on trains. Train food, I’ve come to learn, is its own distinct and expansive category. It encompasses prime rib and crabcakes and the tinkling sound of wine glasses shaking in the premier train dining car; railway baron-style hotel restaurants with impeccably marbled rib-eye steaks and raw oysters flown into the Rocky Mountains; harrowingly timed DoorDash deliveries to refueling station stops and microwave nachos from the snack car; and coolers of food brought from home.
I often bring my own food on long train rides: okra stew and crab rice, or perhaps my dad’s spaghetti and meatballs, as well as fruits and cakes, all packed in my trusted backpack cooler, along with an electric travel Crock-Pot that has saved me on many Amtrak trips. But as Amtrak’s California Zephyr looped around Donner Lake on a trip this past fall, I found myself — too tired to pack a meal this time around, and with a delivered bag of fast food as a consolation prize — sharing a meal with fellow passengers, siblings Elizabeth and Leon from Michigan. They had brought food, mostly grown or raised on their small farm: squash, radishes, grapes, boiled duck eggs, homemade bread, and nut mix. They were going camping in California and liked to remain healthy. “We want to know what we’re eating,” said Elizabeth.
I was fortunate to have traveled America’s blue highways in the golden age of roadside attractions. The year I fell in love with roadside attractions was 1971, when my husband, Michael, and I (newly married and fresh out of college) crisscrossed America, hunting for small-town cafés, diners, and BBQs, compiling a book that would be called Roadfood.
Back then, to review these unheralded mom-and-pop cafés was strange. Foodies (a term that had yet to be popularized) were interested only in eating at gourmet bastions in big cities or abroad. These Continental restaurants were expensive; they served French or northern Italian food and had waiters wielding big pepper mills.
My father is a man of shortcuts and a mental map of Chicago. He has never needed a paper map or a GPS, has never relied on a cell phone for navigation. He knows how to get anywhere in the city in under twenty minutes, and when you give him an address, he has the easiest route calculated within seconds, and a story to go with it. Sometimes his information is outdated: he thinks a neighborhood is still a Polish enclave when it’s been Mexican for years, or he refers to a recently gentrified area as a Puerto Rican port of entry. But he always knows how to get there, and can usually find a bakery or coffee shop in the area where someone still knows his name. He gets energy from fanning out into the neighborhoods and striking up conversations with strangers. His is the art of conversation, of asking questions and caring about the responses, of knowing when and where to leave the best tips. Maybe this particular brand of education inspired him to push me out of our neighborhood when it was time for me to go to high school.
“Time to grow up now,” he said one day, as he handed me a CTA bus token.
Stories of divorce and the disappointments of maturity emerge, along with a hazy account of the family house the narrator’s parents grew up in, in which all that went wrong with grandmother Beezy “had travelled backwards to infect all the stuff that had happened before, all the way back to their births and before that even, and everything tasted a little bit like sadness”. Bamford shows that what we do and who we are as adults makes the world in which children act and grow – especially those stories in our childhoods from which we have not escaped.
Nature today, Nicolson points out, is “residual, what is left over after what we have done to it. The large and overarching story of English birds in the last century is mournful.” Migrating birds are caught and shot by the million long before they reach our shores. Bird-friendly habitat is eaten up by intensive farming. Even our bird-feeding habits can be harmful, spreading disease and skewing the evolutionary odds against the more timid species. Britain, it seems, is a nation of bird lovers who don’t know how to love. Bird School is not a bad place to start learning.