This article is part of Birdopolis, a three-part series that explores the lives of birds that are, by accident or design, spending more time in urban environments. The others are “The Gull Next Door” ...

When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss ...

I am sitting at a slick Manhattan waterfront restaurant on the banks of the East River, New York City, trying to decide why I find the caviar pizza on the menu so disturbing. Jonathan Haffmans, the ...

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that ...

Francis “Bully” Mission Sr., president and founder of Mission Animal Control, is in a good mood when I meet him at a strip mall parking lot on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kaua‘i. He and ...

Marcos Ruiz is lying face down in the mud, legs splayed and one arm sunk up to his shoulder in a narrow hole. When he finally grabs the crab burrowing in the hole, he pushes himself out with his other ...

Plenty of families avoid certain topics of conversation. For Eduardo and his brother, work is off limits. “He has his job, and I have mine,” Eduardo says from the kitchen table of his mother’s house ...

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He ...

They seize suburbs. They seize cities. They seize habitat a continent away. They arrive uninvited. They stay indefinitely. They are indomitable. Who? Barred owls. Strix varia. They have taken a fancy ...

Stingray 12 is surprisingly calm for an animal that’s getting squeegeed. The ray, roughly the size of a dinner plate, is submerged in the sand of a tank about the size of a chest freezer; even the ...

In the fall of 1385, according to a 17th-century Icelandic text, a man named Ólafur went fishing off the northwestern coast of Iceland. In the cold seas cradled by the region’s labyrinthine fjords, ...

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them ...