Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

books

  • The Warbler Bible

    Just in time for the challenge of what Roger Tory Petterson called the “confusing fall warblers” in his ground-breaking field guide comes The Warbler Guide, by Tom Stephenson and Scott Whittle, with drawings by Catherine Hamilton. It is published by Princeton University, whose field guide line is very impressive. I know Tom, who lives in…

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  • Dead Trees

    Just before my trip abroad, I came across Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. I remembered Macfarlane’s name from the introduction he wrote to one of my favorites, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, in the NYRB Classics edition. That was a good sign. And the topic of his book! A best-seller across Ye Pond, The Old Ways…

    mthew

  • Life Along The Delaware Bay

    I didn’t make it to the beach to witness the annual rites of spring of the Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus). But I did manage a virtual trip with this beautiful book. Life Along The Delaware: Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds by Niles, Burger, and Dey, with photography by van de Kam, was published…

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  • The Forest Unseen

    David George Haskell’s The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature is a must-read. Haskell observes a small patch of (very rare) old-growth Tennessee forest through the course of a year and reports on what he experiences, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. It is a book of meditations, grounded, quite literally, in a little…

    mthew

  • Books

    make the best gifts. For the natural history nerds on your list, here are all the books I’ve noted on this blog. And these are my four my most recent reviews if you want to jump ahead: Once and Future Giants by Sharon Levy The Dawn of the Deed by John A. Long Bird Sense…

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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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  • Hung Like a Barnacle

    The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex, by John A. Long. “We all know about the birds and the bees…” goes the jacket and webpage copy for this book, but do we? In fact, I can’t think of a stranger duo of examples to be used as an euphemism for courtship and…

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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…

    mthew