Asher Elbein
By Asher Elbein:
The Art of Looking
An afternoon with the king of birding in Texas, Victor Emanuel. His new memoir, "One More Warbler," hits shelves this week.
Across the river from the Austin airport, past forests and muddy banks, four retention ponds stand open beneath the sky. The wind is heavy with the sickly sweet smell of sewage; sludge dredged from the pond bottoms dries for recycling … Read More
Chasing the Chupacabra
Texas chupacabras have a way of leaving behind bodies — or perhaps, bodies in Texas have a way of becoming chupacabras.
Texas chupacabras have a way of leaving behind bodies — or perhaps, bodies in Texas have a way of becoming chupacabras. Read More
Mapping Texas’ Fraught Environmental History
A new atlas of Texas ecology reveals how thoroughly humans have woven ourselves into the geography of the state, for good and for ill.
A new atlas of Texas ecology reveals how thoroughly humans have woven ourselves into the geography of the state, for good and for ill. Read More
Feeling the Burn in Big Bend
An epic drought has scientists racing to predict the future of Big Bend's unique sky islands.
The 2011 drought that wiped out half the piñon pines in Big Bend’s sky island is a warning shot as the Southwest succumbs to climate change. Read More
Fragile Species
Can bats survive in a human-engineered world?
Can bats survive in a human-engineered world? From the east, a fungal infection is moving cave by cave, leaving obliterated bat populations in its wake. Read More
Epitaph for an Alligator
With its display of mangled carcasses, is Gatorfest really the best way to honor the reptile?
Commodifying nature is nothing new. And perhaps my unease is the discomfort of a city person, who doesn’t have to live around big predators or make a living from them. But it was impossible to shake the feeling that Gatorfest was designed to draw in city folk and present them with alligators as mascots, not as animals in their own right. Read More
Go Wild in Suburbia with ‘Texas Lizards: A Field Guide’
Wildlife habitats: surprisingly close to home.
Texas Lizards: A Field Guide, Troy and Toby Hibbitts’ superlative new book, is an excellent manual for that wilderness. Covering 51 species of lizard — almost one-half of the lizard species in the entire continental United States — it functions as a comprehensive survey of Texas’ lizard zoology. Read More
Unearthing a Lost World
Nearly all of the fossils in this Seymour quarry are Dimetrodon or similar “sail-backed” predators. It’s a concentration of flesh eaters unprecedented in the modern world, and a pattern that’s repeated in the vast majority of dig sites in Baylor County. Paleontologists Robert Bakker and David Temple want to find out why. Read More
The Return of La Llorona
A new horror, and a new film, bring the weeping woman back to life. Read More