Reviews
-
Longleaf
I’m becoming obsessed with Pinus palustris, the longleaf pine that once covered 92 million acres of the southeast from Maryland to Texas, but now exists in only a handful of preserves. I’ve not seen it in its natural state, only as old lumber repurposed. That’s a piece of it above, one of the benches at…
-
Word-Hoards
Kame, karst, kettle, key, kill, kipuka, kiss tank, knob, knoll, krummholz, kudzu. These are all the entries under the letter K in Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, put together by a team of 45 writers and with an introduction by Barry Lopez. What a treasure trove! Sometimes, I’m down on the ol’ species…
-
Arctic Longing
What an amazing and awe-inspiring book. I’ve long heard about Barry Lopez‘s Arctic Dreams but have only just got around to reading it. I was nudged by a fellow conspirator, Erin of the Familiar Wilderness on the other end of the Long Island. And now I want to read it again. Combining human and natural…
-
3/262
Rare Birds of North America is a very interesting book, but it’s definitely for the advanced birder. The front matter, however, includes an excellent discussion of vagrancy and the question of how these birds show up here, through drift, disorientation, overshooting, dispersal… which should be of interest to all nature-literate folk. It’s a much-noted fact…
-
Feral
Heading towards ‘Sconset on the Milestone Road will take you past the Middle Moors, which are nicknamed “the Serengeti” on Nantucket.This nickname is probably the result of too many nature documentaries and the lesson that they usually teach: nature exists somewhere else and is exotic, something to sit back and enjoy from your living room…
-
Bärenfähigkeit
On the liturgical calendar, today is St. Martin’s Day. In the late Middle Ages, “Martin” was often the name given to bears abused and belittled in circuses and other equivalents of side-shows. This is not coincidental, Michel Pastoureau shows in his fascinating The Bear: History of a Fallen King. The Church waged a long war…
-
Bombus
A bumblebee rumbles into the heart of the flower. Identifying bumblebees of the genus Bombus is not an easy task. In their new identification guide, Bumble Bees of North America, Williams, Thorp, Richardson, and Colla note that color patterns “can be strikingly variable within species and strongly convergent between.” As an example of the variability…
-
Three Books
Sometimes I find the perfect description about what I’m up to here: “In an age when the ecological integrity of our planet is threatened on so many levels, anything that strengthens those connections, or makes meaningful our daily arrangements with the world around us, is a form of resistance, a kind of love forged with…
-
Animal Sex
It turns out that one of the best ways to tell species apart is to examine their genitals. There’s an incredible variety of forms of male and female sex organs, even within the species gathered together in a genus, and so for years biologists have been separating, for example, beetles that otherwise look rather similar,…
-
Notes for Further Reading and Doing
Reading: Rob Jett’s ebook The Red-tailed Hawk Journals: A City Birder in Brooklyn is now available. Rob has been documenting the Red-tails of Brooklyn for more than a decade and tells how he first came to these adventures. It’s a great story. Liam Heneghan has written a fine essay on the #1000UrbanMiles project he instigated.…
Backyard and Beyond 