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Someone once told me that a sign of getting old is not when you start paying attention to birds... but when you actually talk about birds with others. Heck, I [...]

To most people, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a biologist: the co-discoverer of evolution by means of natural selection and the man who demoted humans to being the tip of just [...]

In 1968, Richard Proenneke--a 52-year-old Iowan who'd fallen in love with the Alaska outback--headed to a remote spot in the southwestern part of the state to test himself. Using simple [...]

Plodding up the rocky trail, I pause briefly in the thin air to catch my breath. Far below stretches a deep, narrow valley, its high jagged ridges and peaks bathed [...]

Blue-Winged Yellow Warbler 'This pretty little Warbler is migratory, and arrives in Louisiana from the south in the beginning of spring. It is found in open woods, as well as [...]

From the practical to impractical--warmth, identity, spiritual meaning, style--the significance of hair has always been elemental. For one nineteenth-century collector, it became an all-consuming subject of scientific fascination. In the [...]

HUMANS have developed naming things into an art. Of course, we are not the only animals to have names for objects and other organisms we encounter. For instance, prairie dogs [...]

It was a wild looking night to go to sea, but time is too precious to lose even a bad portion of it. --Charles Darwin July 24, 1833 IN READING [...]

Howard Hughes turned doorknobs with Kleenex. Andy Warhol was a hoarder. Charles Darwin (above) had a nervous stomach. The famous, says author Claudia Kalb, are 'no saner or zanier than [...]

By the time 742022-old John Muir (inset, at left) sat for this 1912 portrait, he'd survived many harrowing adventures (see related story, P. 44). He'd also lobbied for the creation [...]

Our island guide Eli Karey offered us clear instructions for what needed to be done. 'Before you climb the tree in the morning, you must get wax from your ear [...]

I first became aware of Alfred Russel Wallace in the spring of 1961, as a biology major in my junior year at college. The professor of a course in 'natural [...]

Alfred Russel Wallace came from a family that, spuriously or not, traced its ancestry back to the great Scottish patriot William Wallace, who died so horribly on the scaffold in [...]

This young man didn't have much going for him, really. Born in 1823, he's twenty-five in this picture [at right]: slim and a little over six feet tall. You might [...]

The marvel of metamorphosis has long mesmerized us, generated religious beliefs and practices, and stimulated scientific research. One of the artists who left an indelible record showing her aesthetic appreciation [...]

WHEN CHARLES DARWIN declared that evolutionary variations occur by chance, many of his contemporaries were alarmed, worrying about the implications of chance for people's belief in the God who designed [...]

In his 37-book Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) wondered why we wished people 'Happy new year' (primum anni diem laetis precationibus faustum ominamur), or said 'Bless you' [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It was the tortoises, finches, and mockingbirds he found on the Galapagos Islands off the west coast of Ecuador, beginning in 1831, that first got young Charles Darwin […]

This August marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Roger Tory Peterson, a legendary naturalist, artist, educator, photographer and filmmaker. Peterson's legacy continues today at the Roger Tory Peterson [...]

Come and stand here,' said a guide in a room on the second floor of the house where the naturalist Carl Linnaeus lived with his wife, five children, several monkeys, [...]

Not many explorers can claim they were caught in a tornado or had a crocodile in their canoe, but not many explorers in the 1800s were women, either. However, Mary [...]

So wrote Robert Frost in the early part of this century. Generations of American writers have been inspired by the woods. Though some, like the literary naturalists John Muir and [...]

While Annie 'Little Sure Shot' Oakley was the best-known female sharpshooter of the Wild West era, this petite woman (who stood under 5 feet tall), naturalist Martha Maxwell (1831-81), was [...]

Helen Jameson has devoted her life to the rescue of orphaned and wounded wild animals such as a bear cub, a cougar, and a moose calf, to name a few. Her animal farm in British Columbia gets donations from the local police department and other civic organizations.

Suppose that you've dipped into Alfred Russel Wallace's classic chronicle of his 14,000-mile odyssey through Southeast Asia (The Malay Archipelago, 1869), his adventures in the Amazonian rainforest (A Narrative of [...]

Byline: Jon Meacham One of the pleasures of my job is tormenting--or at least trying to torment--my friend and colleague Marc Peyser, our arts editor. Marc is a brilliant man, [...]

In the years since Charles Darwin's death in 1882, many sculptures have been created to celebrate the adventurous naturalist and his groundbreaking theory. There's the two-ton marble at London's Natural [...]

The granddaddy of all Wallace websites, including all of the naturalist's published writings, is Charles Smith's Alfred Russel Wallace Page, people.wku.edu/charles.smith/index1.htm. Another comprehensive site is John van Wyhe's Wallace Online [...]

I WAS DRIVING DOWN a dirt road looking for a sheep ranch on the coast of western Australia, trying to find a place to photograph stromatolites, living reefs of ancient [...]

John 'Appleseed' Chapman, one of America's most beloved cultural icons, was born in Leominster, Massachusetts in 1774. More than a folklore legend, he was a naturalist, a humanitarian, and a [...]