Terrain.org's columns include the issue's Guest Editorial as well as regular columns from the editors:
 

Guest Editorial: Migratory, with Audio and Image Gallery
by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Reynolds Chair of Creative Writing, University of Nebraska Kearney

When I came to Nebraska, I came for cranes, Sandhills, primarily. The Platte River is the ultimate source of staging grounds for the Sandhill crane. For eons cranes have come to rest, mate, feed, and prepare for the northward journeys to nesting grounds across northern North America and into Siberia. For perhaps 45 to 60 million years these cranes have existed. The flyway covers what was once the pathway of the Inland Sea. The Platte River is new to cranes in the longevity experienced as a species.  

Almanac: Migrare: A Meditation in Three Movements
by Elizabeth Dodd, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

Most years in spring I travel north from my home in Kansas to the Platte River in central Nebraska to pitch a tent in the sandy soil of an ancient floodplain. Mornings and evenings the chill air seems to shake with the calls of Sandhill cranes. In the blind on the riverbank at dusk, we watch the birds whiffling down from the sky, a dangling-legged fall from flight. Each autumn, in the sun-filled days of September, monarch butterflies move through the world where I live, their bright orange wings like impossibly delicate stained-glass panels poised on the honeysuckle or weaving in flight like toddlers in no hurry to actually arrive. Hanging laundry on the line, walking to work, my movements briefly intersect with theirs.
  
  

Plein Air: The Art of Attraction
by Deborah Fries, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

We are a nation of movers. Even though our mobility reached a record low between 2010 and 2011, and even though most Americans were still living in the state where they were born, last year 6.7 million people packed up their lives and moved to a new state, with hopes of a reality that would be better. Within that huge dispersion were a few who’d been recruited by an economic development strategy intended to revitalize bleak downtowns and blighted neighborhoods: the artist relocation program.
  
  
  
  

Field Notes: Para ser de uso
by Kathryn Miles, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

I am writing this column from a Puerto Rican surf shack, where I have migrated for the winter in search of warm temperatures and surfable waves. I have found both in abundance, along with all that is both vexing and postcard beautiful about a region Puerto Ricans call Porta del Sol. Each morning, an old man wearing a large wooden cross sells me papayas and avocados for pocket change. In the afternoon, I traverse an endless beach with only an occasional horseback rider or feral dog for company. 
  

Bull Hill: The Unheard Sounds of Summer: Throat-Singing vs. the Katydids of Glynwood, with Audio
by David Rothenberg, Terra Nova Editor

The Glynwood Farm is one large open hillside that rises up like a giant bear’s back, somewhere in the lower Hudson Valley. Once a private estate belonging to a man in the Roosevelt administration, it’s now an institute that promotes sustainable local agriculture. From the point of view of insects, on this August night it sure seems pretty healthy. So I decide to take my friend, the most excellent overtone singer Timothy Hill, to see how his long continuous, harmonic-filled tones will blend in with the nighttime crickets and katydids.

A Stone's Throw: Migration in the Borderlands
by Lauret Savoy, Terrain.org Editorial Board Member

Three weeks and 86 years separate the birthday and death-day of my mother, a new year’s child. Those three weeks in January weigh more heavily than I like to admit. I miss her, and need to sift through memories—mine and hers that she shared—to try to narrow the distance between us. In those weeks, this year, news items appeared almost daily about the Tucson Unified School District’s ending of its Mexican-American Studies program so as to comply with Arizona’s ban on teaching ethnic studies. Books were cleared from classrooms, boxed, and locked away.