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A Reading List
I’m just catching up to the Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America by Jeffrey Glassberg. Glassberg is an old butterfly hand, who’s written a couple of other guidebooks to the subject. (Never enough guidebooks!) He takes a firm stand against amateur netters and collectors (i.e. killers), commercially raised butterflies, and butterfly releases at weddings…
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Osprey
Alan F. Poole’s Ospreys: The Revival of a Global Raptor In my half century life, there has been a great recovery of Osprey populations after ruthless persecution and even more ruthless chemical warfare. Luckily, this long-distant migratory bird is highly adaptable. They readily take to artificial nesting spots: 3 of 5 pairs in North America…
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Renegades
Our week of books continues with Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King. This is a collective biography of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Ella Deloria, who took on the “scientific” racists, eugenicists, ethnocentrists, and anti-immigrant forces of a century ago. It is a fascinating…
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Scapegoat
Oh, the French! Everybody knows Gérard de Nerval had a pet lobster, but who knew Henri Toulouse-Lautrec had a trained cormorant he would walk on a leash? “Tom” “supposedly” drank absinthe but met his (it’s hard to sex them) demise when a hunter shot him. Hunters being hunters… Richard King’s The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural…
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The Incredible Egg
Tim Birkhead’s The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg is a perfect thing in and of itself. This a short but intense look at what we know and don’t know about bird eggs. We know an awful lot because of hens and the billions of chicken eggs that are produced every year…
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Degenerate Americans
Does the stereotypical boastfulness of Americans — da biggest & da bestest, by jimminy! — stem from a deep insecurity? Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, by Lee Alan Dugatkin, is about the mammoth chip on the shoulder of the early European Americans. Their betters in France told them they…
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Re: Wild
“We’re not just losing the wild world. We’re forgetting it. We’re no longer noticing it. We’ve lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing. We’re beginning to think it’s not really our business. We’re beginning to act as if it’s not there any more.” I am preaching, as they say, to the…
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Mud
I like to amble, let the way take me. Looking, but without an agenda other than looking. And then being surprised by what I find. There were still insects out and about when I spotted the above structure in mid-September. It’s a mud nest of, probably, a Eumenes potter wasp. Like this one, perhaps: Fraternal…
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Wild Remains
For some, the aesthetics of the native meadow will take some getting used to.
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Raptor Wednesday on Thursday
Having spotted this Red-tailed Hawk on the roof of my apartment building when I returned home last week, I hurried up the five flights to see what I could see. The bird was mantling over its prey, spreading out wings and tail feathers. Classic raptor behavior. We surmise from this that the bird is trying…
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Backyard and Beyond 