This is a blog about nature, particularly the nature of Catalina Island (where I currently live), but it also includes essays and photographs from other places I have worked in, visited or where I have encountered stories and events of the natural kind. These include states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida and California, and countries like Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Germany and Austria. Nature, of course, is everywhere I look, even in the small cracks on the sidewalks of towns and cities, on the top branches of massive tropical trees and deep under the roots of some of these fallen giants. There is life under rocks and under the snow, below the muck at the bottom of a pond or under the dry carcass of a dead seabird baking in the sand. There is drama taking place on the head of a small flower, within the woodpecker hole high on a tree or under the surface of a rotting leaf in the forest floor. These essays are about these places and these encounters.
The essays contained in these pages represent my personal views and perspectives about the subjects, their habitats and sometimes the people that studies or protects them. I take a very liberal view of what has been my life-long focus: the study, understanding and protection of nature. I do a lot of photography to document what I see, and sometimes I add illustrations and even sounds. While I am trained as a scientist, I am interested in many aspects of the natural world, from insects (one of my passions), to mammals, birds, plants and their interactions. I’m also passionate about conservation and environmental education, using my photographs and writings to support my professional work in those fields.
Photography and writing are the tools I use to communicate what I see and what I feel. While a picture can say a thousand words, an illustrated story can say even more. It can change someone’s perspective, opinion, even their life. My hope and goal is that by sharing these thoughts, stories and photographs, I elicit a response, an emotion, thoughts, ideas and eventually actions. Many of the subjects that I’ll write in these pages are in danger of disappearing, bulldozed, chain-sawed, paved over or built upon. I hope that through these stories, some of them can at least postpone their demise, and at best, find a few more people to add their voices to their protection.
A lot of people that come to my talks and lectures have asked me to share them more broadly, so that’s another goal of this blog. A Spanish version of the site with original material is also in the works and will include more and better images.
Finally, the future of this blog depends on the moral support of the people that reads it. I’d like to know if the pieces encountered here made any difference in your life. I’d like to know if they made you angry or sad; made you laugh or think about the topic further; made you write a letter to a politician or made you change something in the way you do things. Sharing these experiences with others will make the blog much more than what I could make it alone. Corrections, contributions from your own experiences, your own photos or art, can make this blog something to be shared and enjoyed.
Welcome and hope you enjoy a glimpse into a Naturalist’s Life.
Carlos
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