Terrain.org articles in this issue:
 

To Wit, to Woo: The Silence of Owls
by Kathryn Miles

Perhaps the most unsettling truth of all is that no one knows for certain. While we may love that which is unknowable about owls in story, most ornithologists say that mystery can be frustrating as hell when it comes to science. What little they do know is that the diurnal appearance of an owl usually indicates the bird is food-stressed.

Ken Wu and the Fight for Canada's Remaining Pacific Coast Old-Growth, with Online Slideshow
Text by Joan Maloof
Photography by Rick Maloof

Are photographs useful in the struggle to preserve beauty and diversity in the natural world? Consider the story of Ken Wu. When Wu was a young boy in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, his parents bought him The Illustrated Natural History of Canada book series. In the Pacific Coast edition Wu found a photograph that fascinated him. It was an old black-and-white photo from the Public Archives of Canada showing four couples, in the old-fashioned dress of that era, waltzing on a tree stump.

A Hole in Time
by John Lane

“I’m pretty confident I’m in the Pleistocene,” Terry Ferguson says when I ask how deep in time he’s standing. Terry is in an excavated pit. The dirt walls are straight, angular, and stair-step steeply downward toward the past like a drawing for a book explaining Euclidian geometry. The Pleistocene, the geologic epoch Terry invokes, ended about 13,000 years ago when glaciers covered about 30 percent of the earth and the climate here in Pickens County, South Carolina, was cool as Minnesota.

A Region of Wounds: Severing the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
by Tom Leskiw

Long before the concept of political borders emerged, human and wildlife movement was tied to natural borders: desert and oasis, oak woodland and grassland, forest and brush field. Mountain ranges — later termed “sky islands” — were linked to valley “seas” of grass and brush by the riparian corridors of the Santa Cruz, San Pedro, and Rio Grande Rivers. The health of the landscape depended upon connectivity and movement.