Reviews
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Where have all the Megafauna gone?
Long time passing. Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About The Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals is hard to put down. It’s sort of a Pleistocene CSI: 13,000 years later, scientists are trying to put together the pieces of what happened to the large animals of North America. These…
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Bird Sense
Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense: What’s It’s Like to Be a Bird details our current knowledge of birds and the history of how we got to this state. Written for the lay reader, a person with an interest in the world; by which I mean it’s hardly necessary that you be a bird watcher to enjoy…
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Empire of the Beetle
“I’m here to protect the trees from the beetle,” said the academic. The logger laughed and said that was bullshit. “The trees and the beetles have been in cahoots for millions of years.”In Empire of the Beetle, Andrew Nikiforuk tells the tale of the destruction caused by the disruption of that cahoot-ness, as tiny beetles,…
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Sturgeon Moon and Time Enough
Tonight’s full moon is the Sturgeon Moon. August will also have a Blue Moon, or second full moon within the month, on the 31st. Those were the days, when sturgeon were once so common on the East Coast and Great Lakes that Native Americans set their lunar calendar to them. Now these ancient fish are…
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Moth Bible
I picked up the new Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by Beadle and Leckie as soon as it came out earlier this year. I’d been anticipating it because I’ve been following Seabrooke Leckie’s blog for several years now. In fact, I was inspired to blog myself by her example. Moths, which…
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The winter beach, the small house
Two of my favorite things. The blurb on Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Winter Beach (1966) says it’s “timeless,” but no, it’s very much a piece of its era. Ogburn traveled down the east coast in the early 1960s and he was mostly bummed out at what he found of the post-war boom. The environmental movement,…
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Break The Fast
I’m reading Ian Tattersall’s excellent but pretentiously entitled Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Ancestors. It is serious food for thought. But you may not want to read this post during breakfast… Our hominid ancestors of some two million years ago were far from top dog; in fact, they were the prey…
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A Wider View
“The poet says the proper study of mankind is man. I say, study to forget all that; take wider views of the universe.” – Henry David Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1852 This blog was begun nearly two years ago under the influence of Thoreau and remains so. Going with a tweeted recommendation from Geoff Wisner,…
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I’m kind of in love with this page from Meriwether Lewis’ journal for February 24, 1806, in which his notes about Thaleichthys pacificus surround his diagonal illustration. The page is reproduced in Field Notes on Science and Nature, a book anybody going into any branch of science that involves note-taking should read.
Backyard and Beyond 