Personal Field Guide

In the 2010 indie film The Way, the actor Emilio Estevez says to the actor Martin Sheen, who’s both Estevez’s on-screen and real-life...

With both hands, my nine-year-old grabs hold of an exposed hemlock root and then kicks his sports-sandaled left foot up to a round, wet...

Oh, if we were all given $7.7 million and an army of engineers to mend the terrible mess we make of things. That’s what repaired Nine...

It’s never quieter in my Pittsburgh neighborhood than after a summer morning thunderstorm, when moments move in dribs and drabs ...

A family welcomes an urban chicken foursome to their new home, a pretty fly A-frame chicken tractor … (Originally appeared in Blue Earth...

Last year, without much forethought, I began taking photographs from a particular spot in a plaza that I regularly visit, capturing...

Admittedly, I don’t usually care much for monocrops of flowers lining city sidewalks - all those begonias, marigolds, and African violets...

In two days, in two different Pittsburgh cemeteries, I saw two northern flickers. The only ground-feeding woodpecker, northern flickers...

I’ve been walking cemeteries of late. Harried life has got me reflecting on the death of things, and, coincidentally or not, I’ve found...

I made an elm leaf recently. In my study. Well, admittedly, I can't actually make elm leaves. But I did draw one, on my study wall. In...

A list of birds I saw and was able to identify, mostly within a single acre of bird-watching terrain ...

I pedal through a billow of white feathers drifting like avian tumbleweeds, bobbing, one small bound at a time ...

I’d just finished telling my neighbor, Ben, about a doe that had bounded into our fenced front yard the other morning ...