1 hour 35 min • 2016
Author Archives: Peter Friederici
Posted inArts & Culture
On Exhibit: paintings of an Amazon woman
On a warm afternoon in 1988, a tippy double-decker boat poked its way through a narrow channel in a Brazilian forest flooded with runoff from the far-off Andes. The trees in this pristine swamp were lush with colorful plants. The most tantalizing was a swatch of flat red leaves clinging to a trunk about ten […]
Posted inNews & Politics
25 Animals We Drove Out of Illinois
INSECTS Passenger pigeon chewing louse (Columbicola extinctus) Brown lacewing (Sympherobius occidentalis) CRUSTACEANS Ohio shrimp (Macrobrachium ohione) Lusty crayfish (Cambarus robustus) MOLLUSKS Winged mapleleaf (Quadrula fragosa) White wartyback (Plethobasus cicatricosus) Rough pigtoe (Pleurobema plenum) Pink mucket (Lampsilis abrupta) Tuberculed blossom (Epioblasma torulosa) FISH Bluehead shiner (Pternotropis hubbsi) Bigeye chub (Hybopsis amblops) Northern madtom (Noturus stigmosus) Stargazing […]
Posted inNews & Politics
25 Animals We Brought to Illinois
ARACHNIDS Honeybee tracheal mite (Acarapis woodi) Deer tick (Ixodes scapularis) Lone star tick (Amblyomma americanum) INSECTS Smokybrown cockroach (Periplaneta fuliginosa) European giant hornet (Vesap crabro) Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) Gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) CRUSTACEANS Spiny water flea (Bythotrephes cederstromii) MOLLUSKS Asain clam (Corbicula fluminea) Zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) FISH Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) Alewife […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Gone With the Wind
When Western civilization met the passenger pigeon it was like two great storms meeting in mid ocean. Given enough time, the more powerful one cancels out the other.
Posted inNews & Politics
Field & Street
Tom Anton is into herps. Always has been, at least from age six or seven, when he came home with a garter snake and asked if he could keep it. He could, and did. Next came a turtle, then frogs, toads, salamanders, fish. By the time he was in high school his mother refused to […]
Posted inNews & Politics
This Island Earth
The extinction of so many island species raises questions about the future of the mainlands most of us live on.
Posted inNews & Politics
Lost in the Tall Grass
The story of what happened when the American political and economic system collided with the wide open prairie
Posted inNews & Politics
The Untamed Heart
Mourning elephants. Bison at play. Spiders in Love? Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy want us to believe that animals have feelings too.
Posted inArts & Culture
In Print: pictures of a dying art
Graceland is perhaps the crown jewel of midwestern cemeteries, numbering among its tenants many of Chicago’s rich and famous, some of whom were commemorated by artists as well known as Lorado Taft and Louis Sullivan. But John Gary Brown, a photographer based in Lawrence, Kansas, has little interest in the famous, either as artists or […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Great Migration
The specks drew my sight out beyond the trees then resolved, barely, into ducks, floating calm and still as decoys. Hundreds of ducks. A thousand. The lake teemed: how had I missed them?
Posted inNews & Politics
Audobon’s Obsession
Scientists and environmentalists criticize his work, but no one disputes the outrageousness of his ambition.