books
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Owls In Culture
Did you know Florence Nightingale had a pet Little Owl? She rescued it and named it Athena, after the Greek goddess, who was ssociated with owls (so much so that the binomial for this European species is Athene noctua). When Nightingale — the first person named after the English version of Firenza, by the way,…
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Turf and Owl
I’ve been reading Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation, a deeply thought-provocking work even with its sprawling and superficial, in the best sense, scope. I wanted to make a note of Dürer’s famous rhinoceros, highlighted in a chapter on the master, in these pages of blog, but a pebble dropped into the mines of…
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Last Ocean
The Last Ocean by John Weller, published by Rizzoli. This year, I’m going to try to be systematic with my natural history reviews. I begin with a remarkable book of photography. Darwin knows, there’s a lot of nature photography out there on-line, in print, and on TV (and DVD etc.). A lot of it is…
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Book Gifts To Keep On Giving
Have you reached the anti-gift stage yet? Most of the crap that will be given with the best of intentions this holiday season will be thrown out soon, adding yet more to the garbage we so heedlessly produce and litter the entire world with. And this after the production of that needless junk has caused…
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White’s Selborne
Have you read Richard Mabey’s rousing defense of nature writing? You should. I’ll wait here until you return. Mabey quite rightly marks the beginnings of nature writing in English with Gilbert White (1720-1793), the British country parson whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne I’ve finally come around to reading. Mostly: I picked up a…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Parkman’s Unending Buffalo
“The country before us was now thronged with buffalo,” wrote the young Bostonian Francis Parkman at the beginning of “The Chase” in The Oregon Trail, his book about his adventures out in the west in 1846. (I was immediately reminded of the similarly titled chapters in Moby-Dick, published five year later; turns out Melville read…
Backyard and Beyond 