Reviews
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Avian Builders
Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by (the puckishly named) Peter Goodfellow. So what don’t birds build their nests out of? Most of us are probably familiar with the grassy/twiggy cup nests built by a number of songbirds, some lined with moss, some reinforced with mud, like the classic, omnipresent American Robin nest.…
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Feathers
I love this cover to Thor Hanson’s book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle. It was designed by Nicole Caputo. Some things you’ll learn in this book: feathers pre-date birds; some dinosaurs had colored feathers; feathers are amazing at insulation and waterproofing; a peregrine has been recorded diving at 242 mph and making turns…
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Bird Week
This is Bird Week at the New York Times’ City Room. If you’ve found my blog by way of their recommendation, welcome! Please consider subscribing for the freshly baked, ad-free, posts of tomorrow and the days ahead. In the meantime, get out there and watch the birds. You can start on the streets, where house…
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A cool note on fire
Fire was probably the most important technology used by the native Americans before the coming of the Europeans. Fire cleared land for cultivation, fertilizing it with ash. Fire thinned out forests into game park-like woodlands for the all important deer, and prevented succession from taking over rich meadows with brush and trees again. Fire created…
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Wild Urban Plants
Let us now praise infamous weeds. “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England… Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.…
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Soiled
“We overcrowd the world. The elements can hardly support us. Our wants increase and our demands are keener, while Nature cannot bear us.” Sound familiar? It sounds like it was stripped from today’s headlines, in the midst of a U.N. conference in Japan (where they’re eating dolphins, whales, and blue fin tuna to death) on…
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Strange Fish
Back in March, I found a perfectly preserved northern pipefish on the coast of Brooklyn. When I found it, I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it looked like a straightened seahorse. It turns out that seahorses and pipefish are related, in the Syngnathidae family along with the seadragons. I’ve never seen a…
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Architecture
Now that most of the leaves have fallen, it’s a good time to start looking for bald-faced hornet nests. These two samples are from Prospect Park. These nests are abandoned each year, so they are harmless in winter. Wasp queens are the only ones who survive the winter, and they do it underground, or deep…
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In the archives
Foot- and end- notes are like the underbrush: it’s crowded down there, and you have to wade through a mess of grass or leaves to find something juicy. I was on the trail of a book recently, sent there I do not remember why, and found a copy at the NYPL. This was William Beebe’s…
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Review: The Journal
The Journal: 1837-1861 By Henry David Thoreau Edited by Damion Searls Preface by John R. Stilgoe New York Review Books. 677 pp. $22.95 “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.” So it began, October 22, 1837. Twenty-year-old David Henry Thoreau, who would never…
Backyard and Beyond 