Armchair Naturalist

Printed on the back of my MetroCard (the local public transit system’s swipe fare card, which replaced the token of happy memory) as part of the “Train of Thought” program:

“Within five miles of where you live, there are enough strange things to keep you wondering all your life. Probably in your dooryard may be found enough to employ the intellect of a strong man; one of the great discoveries in science was made by a man in cultivating the ordinary garden pea.” — E.W. Howe, Ventures in Common Sense, and this blog in a nut pea shell.

Reading lately:
Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living With Wildlife in Suburbia. Stephen DeStefano’s book is timely after this spring’s coyotes-in-Manhattan hoopla. Now, nobody is going to call Manhattan suburbia, but this just proves that the line between urban and wild is profoundly ambiguous. And we are the animals that need to get used to it.

“We are members of that community of the land. You may not feel it if you live in the middle of a large city…but the truth is we all do — we make our living off the land. No matter where or how you live, your livelihood, health, and well-being are based on the land. Your water, food, air, basic necessities and material possessions, recreational opportunities and vacations, and in short everything that you depend on for survival and a good and decent life depend on the land…”

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. This rich anthology (from the Greek for gathering of flowers) delves into the complex relationships of African Americans to land and nature, relationships usually written out of nature poetry. Fascinating. It reminds us that the virtually synonymous conflation of “urban” and “black” is a relatively recent invention, and that one town’s grand old elm hangs with another community’s strange fruit.

In the to-read stack: Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle; Raffles, Insectopedia; Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth.

“Here was something that had been happening all my life, and I’d never paid any attention to it.” Phoebe Snetsinger, on seeing a Blackburnian warbler just come north in the spring, in Life List: A Woman’s Quest For the World’s Most Amazing Birds, by Olivia Gentile.