Vermont Quarterly
Since 2006, I’ve been the staff science writer for Vermont Quarterly, a print & online magazine published by the University of Vermont. I’ve written dozens of pieces for VQ—including 17 cover stories. Here’s a selection of them.
LISTENING TO LEVIATIANS
Call me wishful. Some two miles off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, in a fiberglass fishing boat, researcher Laura May-Collado scans the horizon. She’s hunting for humpback whales in this warm and watery part of the world. And I’m looking around too, tipsy on anti-sea-sickness medicine, hoping to see a white whale, perhaps breaching above the waves like the second coming of Moby Dick.
TO SAVE THE FOREST, SHOULD WE MOVE THE TREES?
It’s eight degrees Fahrenheit. Off trail, at 2,042 feet of elevation, on the side of Camels Hump, Professor Steve Keller takes off his gloves, pulls a Dell tablet out of his backpack, unrolls a wire, and plugs it into a scrawny maple tree. Well, actually, into a tiny sensor hanging under a white plastic funnel hanging off the side of the maple. The winter sunshine feels beautiful and the sky glows with a preternatural blue. The trees stand still, a mix of beech and sugar maple, plus a few yellow birches, all silent, their elbows clothed in new snow.
My story and cover photo.
FIXING PHOSPHORUS
From corn fields to sewage plants to this trip in a motorboat, I went out with scientists who are working to get phosphorus to stay where it’s wanted and out where it’s not.
I wrote and photographed this cover story.
STORY CORES
In Shelly Rayback’s lab, these tree cores—extracted from a forest on the side of Camel’s Hump—tell a tale in each ring, a story going back centuries. I hiked up the mountain with her—a dendrochronologist and badass tree corer—looking for ancient spruce. Then I wrote this story.
My photos and story.
KEEPING BEES
Sex has always been rather troublesome for plants. Pursuing a mate is hard when you have roots and no brain. When the first bees came to be, perhaps 125 million years ago, they took flight as botanical matchmakers—and remade the world.
My story and photos.
Here’s the photo I took—of a rather winsome Drury’s Long-horned bee (Melissodes druriellus), a native and solitary species.
THE VERMONTILATOR
In the early months of 2020, as Covid-19 began to spread across the United States, a team of scientists, engineers, doctors, and students at the University of Vermont wondered if the pandemic might overwhelm the state’s hospitals—and, particularly, if there would be enough ventilators. So they set out to design and build a simple, inexpensive, emergency ventilator that could be used in Vermont—or anywhere else around the world. '
I wrote this cover story about their efforts (with a great photo by my friend Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonniquist).
FIELD TEST
After crossing the bridge off North Hero Island, I pass the tiny public library and St. Amadeus Church in Alburgh, out through the open pastures beyond the village, and pull over for a moment at a farm stand stacked with tomatoes and squash—the 130-acre Darby Farm. Here, Heather Darby and her husband raise dairy heifers, tend bees, and sell fruits and vegetables by the side of the road. Her great-great-great- great-grandfather, Jonathan Darby, started farming on this shore of Lake Champlain in 1800. The farm passed down to George Darby, then Ransom Darby, Aubrey Darby, Arthur Darby, and Alan Darby, Heather’s dad. In 2003, she took over the farm—father to daughter.
I wrote this profile and cover story about Darby, a farmer and visionary agronomist.
ORIGIN OF A BIOLOGIST
In her early childhood, Melissa Pespeni lived on the edge of the sea on the Japanese island of Okinawa. She would walk down to the water with her snorkel, plunge into the waves to catch fish, then take them home to her aquarium. Later in her childhood, she lived in a shack in the woods in California with just her sister, surviving on Oreo cookies. I wrote a story about how her sometimes-wonderful, sometimes-hellish upbringing wended its way to being a professor of biology and expert on sea stars and urchins. And what that has to do—if anything—with growing up poor and being a woman of color.
My story and photos.
STRONG AS SILK
Ingi Agnarsson’s close-shaved head glints in the midafternoon sunshine as he scans along a stream where it flows out to a grassy river. From high in the trees on the other side of the water, the howls of indri, the largest lemurs in Madagascar, float down like arboreal whale song.
I traveled with Agnarsson into the depths of a rainforest—in search of Darwin’s Bark spiders and wrote this VQ cover story.