I noticed that this article, which was published in the Summer 1999 issue of Earth Island Journal, has fallen off the Journal’s website archives. So I’m putting it up here. It’s badly dated, and there are things I say with assurance here that I
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As persistent readers of this blog will know I’ve been working for some time on a book on Joshua trees, and one of the more interesting facets of the Joshua tree’s lifestyle is the tree’s reproductive partnership with two species of moths,
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Here is a fine, very well-fed individual of the species Spermophilus variegatus, also known as the rock squirrel. This one happened to be working the crowd outside the El Tovar on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, but the species ranges throughout
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A running coyote, painting by Carl Dennis Buell
The ancestor of all dogs climbed trees like a cat.
Or so the experts hypothesize. The raccoon-sized, foxy omnivore Prohesperocyon is as likely a candidate for the ancestor of all dogs, wolves and
… (continues)I'm a natural history and environmental writer, an editor and photographer. I've lived in upstate New York, the SF Bay Area, Washington, DC, the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles. My writing has appeared in publications ranging from Camas and Orion to Bay Nature, California Wild, the Boston Globe, and about thirty daily papers nationwide when I was a syndicated garden writer for the Knight-Ridder chain. No, I never got to meet the talking car.
I've traveled extensively in the Mojave, Great Basin and Sonoran deserts, as well as in the steppes and slickrock country of the Colorado Plateau.
This blog has existed in one form or another since 2003. At first it was called Creek Running North, after Pinole Creek, near where I lived back then. I moved in 2008 and renamed the site Coyote Crossing, but about a thousand people* still link here under the old name.
My publicist tells me I should mention that my writing here has frequently been called the best on the Internet.
* May not actually equal 1000

All content Copyright © 2011 Chris Clarke. All Rights Reserved.
Banner painting by Carl S. Buell.