Writer, naturalist, whale watcher, and longtime Orion contributor Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of several books of ...

While we the living, not sleeping, move through days of snow and cloud, rain and fog, the willow stems lie dormant, perhaps dreaming, or perhaps only sleeping. Listening to the rill of the river ...

I DROVE DOWN WASHINGTON TURNPIKE, a straight sandy road cutting through the pine country of Wharton State Forest, the largest tract of wilderness in New Jersey. Surrounding me were trunks of slash ...

BRENDAN AND I wouldn’t ever speak directly about our estrangement. There were some topics we’d learned to avoid entirely to “keep the peace,” as my mother would say. I bit my tongue when the topic of ...

As I look back on a topsy-turvy 2025, while testing out my new year’s mantra – radical optimism – I’m grateful for the chance to share with you, our community, some personal thoughts and exciting ...

Belabored breath. Hesitation. My companions, sitting across the small table in an empty seaside café, are unable to say no. The wind howls, and we clutch our coffee cups. Out the window, a misted bog ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT cattle mutilations when a round of them popped up in Oregon. The details, I need to warn you, are graphic. In 2019, five bulls were found dead in a wooded area, fifteen miles from ...

PEGASUS COULD NEVER GET OFF LIGHTLY. Born of Poseidon’s salt sea and blood dripping from Medusa’s severed head, the winged horse was saddled with the task of bearing Zeus’s thunderbolts, then tamed by ...

WHAT DIFFERENTIATES THE CRYPTID from other monsters is that cryptids come with reports of local sightings. Unlike the unicorn—representations of which are known to be totally fantastical—the cryptid ...

BIGFOOT ISN’T REAL, but black bears are—that’s the subtext of a recent study by Dr. Floe Foxon mapping bear populations relative to cryptid sightings. That study, published in 2024, sparked my ...

LEAVING A GARDEN IS LIKE leaving a marriage—it’s an abandonment of the plan. The plan, which, in the perennial garden, extends beyond death. “When we were planning our first backyard perennial garden, ...