NYC people: it is 4:27 PM on December 23rd. You are *out of time* to come up with a thoughtful, original Christmas gift for a loved one. Luckily, Classic Harbor Line is running Seal and Seabird tours all winter. They can be booked at the click of a button! Dates/deets/links here:

Latest from me! open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Over the next year, I’m doing a series about how urban animals adapt to human-built spaces for the Architecture League’s cool magazine @urbanomnibus.bsky.social. First one is about the ways marine life makes use of NYC’s piers and pile fields + the art is beautiful urbanomnibus.net/2025/12/the-...

Hello, New Yorkers! I am once again leading a ton of boat tours from Manhattan down to the wintry edges of the Atlantic Ocean to see seals and seabirds! The boat is beautiful, warm, and spacious! The food is delicious! This is basically a perfect holiday gift! open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Wow, big news: I have been awarded the Nobel Prize in the miscellaneous maritime newsletter category

Thrilled to report that I’m writing a book about the ecology and human history of herring, menhaden, anchovies, sardines, and other small fish that swim in huge schools. DM’s open for all things forage fish. Tell me your sprat and sand-lance stories!

My newsletter turned 1 last week, and I celebrated the first ever Hudson River Fish Migration Celebration open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Check out these big goofy babies

Carl Hiaasen writes oddball detective novels about Florida and our strange relationship to the natural world. They’re easy, and fun, and everyone should read nine or ten of them this summer open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Apparently before the St. Lawrence Seaway opened when they wanted to get large ships into the Great Lakes they just brought them up the Mississippi and shoved them through the Chicago River

Fun new landlubber tomorrow morning! My love letter to the king of vacationland noir

Wrote about an obscure marine invertebrate that can dramatically reshape the sediment along the Atlantic coast of the United States open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Soilmaxxing, in my drill era

It’s april 9th 2025 and it seems likely that the New York Mets will never lose a baseball game again

Unfortunately, the New York Mets have been defeated by the cheating Houston Astros in the first game of the 2025 baseball season

New Landlubber is called Violence of the Clams. It’s about the terrifying world that bivalves and other shellfish live in and features this absurd picture I made of Werner at the beach open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

The Mets are going to win the World Series this year I think

He invented “dinner 2” years ago, where he finishes his food and then bangs his bowl around like Oliver Twist, but recently he has conceived “lunch for cats” (the same thing, but at like 1PM)

I’ve been thinking about pitching a story about the “mini mysteries” posed by range maps for a while. I have about a dozen screenshots on my phone of maps I have questions about. Here’s a random orchid in the Northeast (peat bogs?) and the “Fox Sparrow Bermuda Triangle” in the Dakotas (???)

The Hudson River is Londonpilled and “ThamesMaxxing. It is in its Bleak House Era

Are there actually “flat earth people” or is it a “birds aren’t real” type epic bacon meme? I just briefly tried to find this out and I can’t quite tell

Reminder: Every ecological victory is a human victory. Every ecological loss is a human loss. "Scientists have reported fish species like alewives, shad, and even the endangered Atlantic sturgeon surging upstream to return in numbers unseen for generations."

A little bit of this and that in this week’s Landlubber. If you knew Eric Angel Ramos, I included my memories of him in here. We weren’t super close or anything, but he was kind to the high school kids I worked with and shared his octopus with them, and that meant the world to them 💙

This is from 2016 when Cuomo’s closest associates got recorded on a wiretap discussing bribes, which they called “boxes of ziti” as a joke (the joke was their own behavior was similar to the organized crime depicted on The Sopranos)

I am spite-voting in the mayoral primary in New York City: my vote will go to the candidate who says the meanest thing about Andrew Cuomo. Zohran currently winning, but it’s just day 1 of this sweepstakes. Anyone could pull ahead by calling Cuomo a crook, or a worm

The folks at Audubon interviewed me about my little bird blog. Give it a read! "Clashes over birds throughout US history often cut straight to the country’s deepest wounds and oldest struggles. Bird History is his effort to share what he’s learned and to ponder what we’ve lost."

Cardinal and carolina wren singing out my window all morning, we are so fucking back

You can only have so many of these awful moments in politics before you kinda shrug and say “huh I guess this is just how things are” but Andrew Cuomo being elected mayor of New York City would be such a depressing development

Looking forward to teaching a nature writing course at @NYBG this spring. We’ll to read some really great stuff, and help each other write, and talk about cities and their place in nature writing! If that sounds like something you’re into, I’d love to see you there www.enrole.com/nybg/jsp/ses...

I think I’ll pass on that, actually!

Landlubber this week is the first of what will probably be many pieces about shells and why they’re shaped the way they are. Ended up cutting a discussion of some of the more cryptic ammonoids but check these things out open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Never noticed that nearly every shell opens on the right until I read this by @russ-owl.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

Heartbroken to lean that Eric passed away in December. He was extremely warm and like-able, and generously mentored four of my high school-aged students out in Rockaway, bringing them into his lab each week to teach them about octopuses. What a tragedy sur.rockefeller.edu/eric-angel-r...

A talented photographer named Carlos Hernández came out on our seal boat last Sunday and I’m lucky to get to feature his amazing photos in this week’s Landlubber! Link is in my bio, and I’ll share Carlos’s insta in a link below (but you can also click into it through the newsletter)

I had a goofy little adventure this afternoon with the park rangers helping a Cooper’s hawk that got stuck in a dugout in Inwood Hill Park

I was very moved by this lovely tribute to a friend from @ryanfm.bsky.social The odd-couple birding friendship story is familiar! There’s something amazing about this interest (birds, nature, whatever) that lets you get close to people you wouldn’t meet otherwise open.substack.com/pub/ryanmand...

Mallard drake heads go crazy in the right light 🟩🟦🟪⬛️

Hudson River has been stunning these last few days

Truly nothing like watching a Cooper’s hawk that’s dialed in to the neighborhood bird feeders

Gm

Was walking by the snowy cliff today and caught a song sparrow freely passing in and out of the insulated layer under the snow, using the little gaps made by the slope and the dead leaves. Would be interested to know how many animals are just moving around in there all winter

I wrote about my two favorite ways to defeat winter gloom (getting out to the water and making lots of dashi) open.substack.com/pub/waterway...

When people who are really into outer space get all excited about planets being in a line, or moving behind each other I’m like “haha wow neat” but I am not interested. It feels like looking at a watercolor someone else’s 1yo made

What’s the deal with this arch hidden in the backyard space behind an auto-shop on Broadway? It’s like 5 blocks below the tip of Manhattan

When you have a bunch of homemade dashi in the fridge the meals you can make in 5 minutes are just orders of magnitude better

In #Panama news: my book, DOUBLE EXPOSURE, has at its (actual) center: the 1st successful (in the complicated military sense of the term) expedition across the Panamanian isthmus, executed by Civil War vets and a photographer U know even if U think U don't www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

the "esc" key on a keyboard is a holdover from early-'90s personal computers. on some models it would dispense a can of escargot out of one of the unused drive bays. they put it in the corner so you wouldn't press it by accident because you only got three of them. i pushed it once and got grounded

Watching this all time banger on my birthday

I love my cozy little Christmas tree but this is such a wasteful practice lol