Birding Is Booming. So Where Are the Black Birders?
Tiffany Adams grew up in the Chelsea-Elliott Houses, a sprawling, low-income housing project on the west side of Manhattan. There, cookie-cutter brick buildings are separated by modest courtyards with benches and tables. Trees and grassy yards enclosed by black, wrought-iron fences dot the fringes of...
Birds of Incarceration
On an air-conditioned bus to Tule Lake, we fold shimmering sheets of colored paper into delicate, mystical birds. The weight of the shared ritual makes my fingers fumble. Itβs been decades since I made origami with my immigrant mother, and I feel pressure to reprise...
2019 Nature Calls
I finally captured an image of a pronghorn with a healthy, pronged horn and without details blown out. So I’m doing wildlife again–half mammals, half birds. And I’ve been saving these for this calendar. Nine of these pictures were never shared on social media. Making...
No Right Way to Be Outside
The first time I tried my hand at astrophotography (shooting the stars, as opposed to shooting stars) was on a clear night just outside Mount Rainier National Park. I was renting a cabin with my wife and her family, a trio of sisters from Colombia...
WE ARE OUTSIDE!
One of my favorite places in the outdoors has multiple trails, several different habitats, and offers spectacular views of a major snow-capped peak. There is an old-growth forest where, among the mossy trees, you are serenaded by the rat-ta-tat-tat of pileated woodpeckers, hoots from barred...
Urban Osprey Nest
This is a sampling of images taken while monitoring an osprey nest in the Union Bay Natural Area in the middle of Seattle, Washington, behind Husky Stadium. Included are some of the neighbors and onlookers. The monitoring is in its fourth month, beginning in early...
Japanese American Activation
After a sometimes rousing, mostly solemn, and often tear-filled memorial ceremony brimming with Japanese and Japanese American influences, a scene unfurled that, to common understanding, may have seemed very un-Japanese. It happened beside an old jail nested in a much larger prison, the Tule Lake...
Chinese Americans in Yosemite
Bill in California Legislature Will Honor Roles Like Tie Sing’s Contributions by yet another community of colorβChinese Americansβto Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada are proposed to be honored by a bill introduced in the California state legislature. Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) 262 was...
‘Every Kid in a Park’ Saved?
WASHINGTON, D.C. β Bending to public outcry, including a strong stance by Next 100 Coalition members, the Department of the Interior is expected to renew the βEvery Kid in a Parkβ program that helps ensure equitable access to U.S. public lands for fourth graders and...
Beyond Bears Ears
This piece appeared in the March 2018 issue of Outside Magazine The last time I visited Yosemite National Park, I made the jaunt to Glacier Point. Standing at the edge of the drop-off, I tried to imagine myself taking in the magnificent vista while discussing...
Taylor Finds Green Orgs Dropping Ball on Diversity
Back in the early 1980s, during an undergraduate environmental studies class, Dorceta Taylor asked a question that would whisk her onto a path leading, in recent years, to groundbreaking research on diversity in environmental organizations. Taylor realized about midway through the course at Northern Illinois...
1,000 Words
My first time as a photographer βin the fieldβ is stored in a place in my memory banks reserved for other indelible firstsβkiss, published story, time I set my eyes upon my daughters. I remember slogging along in a flooded farm field with a small...
