One Woman's Quest to Save Wild Trees
We have rattle snakes here in the desert. We’ve invaded their territory, and I do my best to remember that. We don’t kill them. Here is a series of photos of one snake our cat found in our fenced-in back yard. Luna our cat sat, ears pricked forward, staring intently into a group of flowering [...]
I’ve been to Burma twice, both times to see elephants. In 2009, with my film making friend Hazel Chandler, we ended up in a forest where we slept in a villager’s house on stilts. To use the bathroom during the night, I had to maneuver down the wobbly wooden ladder and wander into the woods. [...]
I’ll encounter all kinds of snakes when I venture into different forests around the world. I like snakes. As children, my siblings and I would catch gopher snakes and let them wind themselves around our hands and arms–even sometimes, our necks. We learned how to hold them, giving their bodies support as well as their [...]
I have one phobia. I fear that while climbing tall trees in tropical rainforests, a huge, 9″ diameter tarantula will jump onto me and its eight hairy legs, surely with suction cups, will cling to my face. The spider’s underbelly will ride my nose. Years ago I read that tarantulas in the Amazon are huge, [...]
A few days before Christmas, in 2003, I moved into a tree house on an elephant sanctuary in Northern Thailand. I sold my home in Ojai, California, venturing into the world as a pilgrim rather than a tourist. I left everything behind (my daughter took my two rescued cats from Canada) and, like a leaf [...]