Theodore Roosevelt. From the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

"There was once a floating wisp of glory" describes for many of us, not Camelot, but the conservation-friendly Theodore Roosevelt Administration. That special era came to mind recently when I heard the dispiriting  (disgusting?) news that Congress had passed legislation permitting visitors to carry firearms into our national parks.  The first President Roosevelt was not a panty-waist when it came to totin' guns, but he could be persuaded by public opinion to back off from unseemly behavior in the woods.

This early spring afternoon, as I walked past a still-fallow corner of our vegetable garden, I noticed a metallic dark-blue insect darting frenetically through the tufts of grass and weeds already growing there. It was a slender little spider wasp, maybe a half-inch long, its smoky wings ceaselessly twitching and fluttering as it ran about searching, searching, for something. Ah, found it! The wasp suddenly reappeared from behind a clump of weeds and dragged into view an abult female wolf spider.

By nature, I’m a nattering nabob of negativism. Skeptic is my middle name, and no, I’ve never believed in fairies, angels, or UFOs. But I like to think there is a cougar or two out there in the forests of the northeast, and scientists are now beginning to sort out reality from the disinformation and prop up my positive side.

A harlequin duck (Glen Smart/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)
If Rudyard Kipling had experienced a Maine winter (though he did live for a time in Vermont), he might have let loose a spoonerism to cap one of his most famous lines, to wit: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the Maine shall tweet.”

Yellow perch (Division of Public Affairs/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

Is a lake an island? Fisheries managers have tended in the past to think so, treating each lake as a closed system. Man may move freshwater fish around, stocking some here and removing others there, but the fish themselves were judged to be mostly sedentary. Now many ichthyologists are expressing second thoughts, and suggest that, for their finny subjects, lakeshores do not a prison make.

The two most influential men of the nineteenth century were born just hours apart on February 12, 1809. One, the American politician Abraham Lincoln, annually receives the bulk of attention on that date here in the U. S., which is understandable. His birthday mate, the British-born scientist Charles Darwin, launched what is arguably the most far-reaching intellectual revolution in history, but he remains scandalously maligned among large parts of the American public. Surveys consistently show that more than half of our population doesn’t think evolution happens. As Natalie Angier, a prominent science writer, puts it, Darwinism is “the national blood sport.”

On a chilly, overcast night in mid-June more than 30 years ago I rode down Maine’s Muscongus Bay in a small boat with a suitcase full of puffins. I was along to write an article for Audubon about Steve Kress, a staff member at the Audubon Camp in Maine, who was fulfilling his science-based dream-the restoration of Atlantic puffins to Eastern Egg Rock at the bay’s mouth where they had been extirpated by excessive hunting many decades earlier.

“What’s in your wallet?” Not a query likely to prompt an enthusiastic response in this downbeat financial climate. But the question, “What’s in your backyard?” may set a budding naturalist off on a journey as fascinating and rewarding as an African wildlife tour. In tune with campaigns among biologists to assess animal and plant populations in specific local areas before human developments blow them away, the results may be of genuine use to science.

Celeb-watchers keep tabs on their idols’ indecorous antics via TV, tabloids, and raunchy websites. We natural history buffs, on the other hand, enjoy tracking the lives, loves, and calamities of brute creation down the ages through a more wondrous medium--amber. A sticky resin that seeped from trees in distant millennia, amber trapped all sorts of small plants and animals. Hardening into yellowish-brown, translucent “caskets,” it preserved and carried these remnants of life through millions of years into the museums and biological laboratories of today.

United States Geological Survey
For many years I spent a part of each winter’s day in a small cabin on the coast of eastern Maine. A wood-burning stove kept me toasty in the confined space and I worked, assiduously or otherwise, on a standard Olivetti typewriter. When I looked out a window I saw an ice-rimmed shoreline and, on the bay beyond the ice, scattered clusters of ducks. And so began my enchantment with the bufflehead.