Sense of Place

Field notes on ecology, history, and belonging

A place is never only scenery. It is a convergence of geology and weather, roots and wings, memory and labor, names and stories, meals and migrations, the histories people preserve, and the histories landscapes continue to hold. Sense of Place is where I follow explore those convergences.

I write as an ecologist, environmental educator, traveler, and person trying to belong more fully to the living world. Some pieces begin close to home, along the Eno River, in Duke Forest, or among the fields and bottomlands of North Carolina. Others emerge from travel, museums, archives, vineyards, farms, historic sites, and working landscapes farther afield. Some are deeply researched natural and cultural histories; others are brief field notes, photographs, or ponderings. Together, they ask how attention might deepen both belonging and responsibility.

There is no single correct route through this site. Begin with an animal, a tree, a landscape, a flavor, a work of art, or a question. Follow whatever calls to you.

Choose a path

Animals and more-than-human lives

Animals move through these pages as individuals, ecological participants, neighbors, travelers, and bearers of cultural meaning. I write about their evolutionary histories and daily lives, the landscapes they require, the pressures they face, and the many ways people have observed, named, feared, celebrated, and remembered them.

The Eastern Box Turtle series follows one familiar turtle across deep time and contemporary landscapes. You might begin with Before the Box: The 260-Million-Year Story of the Eastern Box Turtle, trace its home range, movement, and remembered routes, consider young turtles, interrupted routes, and conservation, or explore the seeds, spores, and forest relationships carried inside the turtle.

The cuckoo essays follow another kind of route—from family history and language to deep time, migration, weather, music, and cultural memory. Begin in the land of the cuckoos, travel through their evolutionary history, follow the green waves of rain, caterpillars, and cicadas, and listen for rain crows in Indigenous records, Black Piedmont music, literature, and weather lore.

You can also browse all animal writing or follow the broader bird archive, where hawks, juncos, bitterns, woodpeckers, and other birds enter the story.

Trees, forests, and fungi

Trees are among the clearest expressions of place. They translate climate, water, disturbance, geology, and human history into living form. Fungi make many of those relationships possible, threading together roots, wood, soil, decay, and renewal—often just beyond ordinary notice.

The Central European tree series begins with why the region is such a good place to learn trees and then moves through mountain forests, broadleaf forests of oak, hornbeam, and linden, floodplain forests along the Danube, Morava, and Tisza, and dry woodlands shaped by rock, loess, light, and disturbance. The complete Central European tree archive gathers the full series.

Closer to home, you can ask what happens to a nut on the forest floor, meet fruiting fungi and their woody partners in the Piedmont, or pause with snow fungus, milkcap mushrooms, and three Amanitas. Explore all Plants & Fungi or wander through the dedicated fungi archive.

Landscapes near and far

Field notes begin with being somewhere: walking, listening, looking closely, and allowing a place to become more than a backdrop. Many entries are rooted in North Carolina’s Piedmont, in river corridors, forests, wetlands, rocky outcrops, and familiar neighborhoods. Others follow paths through Iceland, Honduras, Mexico, Morocco, Central Europe, and beyond.

You might begin with the rhythm of the land at Sennett’s Hole, return to the wetlands of Pettigrew State Park and Pocosin Lakes, spend five hours in Oaxaca, walk through Ghost Ranch, visit Punta Gorda on Roatán, or step onto Vigur Island, an Icelandic heritage farm and nature reserve.

Browse the full collection of Field Notes or explore places through photographs.

Culture, museums, and histories held in place

Natural history and cultural history are not separate stories. Landscapes hold migration and displacement, labor and art, family memory and public memory. Museums and historic sites can reveal those layers—but they can also ask us to notice what has been preserved, what has been omitted, and who has been allowed to tell the story.

Explore the deep histories of Roman Volubilis in Morocco, the intertwined cultural and ecological story of Punta Gorda, the resonances of old houses, or the meeting of landscape and art in Lawren Harris and the Group of Seven and the Glass Flowers at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

Continue through Culture & Historical Sites and Museums.

Attention, relationship, and inner landscapes

Some essays turn the practice of observation inward. They ask what nature does within us, how external landscapes become emotional geographies, and how attention can help us return to connection, spaciousness, justice, grief, and aliveness.

Begin with Daily Noticing, consider what lies beyond conventional measurements, listen as nature calls us back, or follow sadness to a river that continues to sing in Even when…. Other paths lead through emotional geography, naming deities, and the universe within.

Explore all Ponderings.

Terroir: tasting place

Terroir is one of our most literal ways of taking landscape into the body. These essays explore how geology, climate, cultivation, migration, trade, history, and memory gather in a glass or at a table. Wine becomes not an escape from ecology and history, but another route into them.

Follow Albariño from humid North Carolina to Galicia, encounter Nebbiolo in Piemonte, explore the limestone, marl, and long human history of Burgundian wine, or travel through native grapes and ancient cultivation in Greek wine.

Browse all Terroir Tastings.

Wander freely

If you would rather roam than choose a path, visit the complete archive. You can also browse the site’s broad collections: Animals, Plants & Fungi, Field Notes, Culture & Historical Sites, Museums, Ponderings, Terroir Tastings, and Photographs.

About me

I am Nicolette L. Cagle, an ecologist, environmental educator, writer, and photographer based in Durham, North Carolina. My work lives at the intersection of natural and cultural history. Whether I am teaching in a forest, following a turtle across a fragmented landscape, learning a tree through its bark and branching, reading the history of a place, or writing beside a river, I am interested in the same underlying questions: How do we come to know a place? How does that knowledge shape who we become? And how might deeper attention lead us toward care?

I am also the author of Saving Snakes: Snakes and the Evolution of a Field Naturalist. You can learn more about my teaching, scholarship, and public work or explore my broader publications and writing.

Wherever you enter, I hope you find something that encourages you to linger, learn, and look again. and then return to your own places with renewed curiosity, affection, and care.