books
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Field Etymology
Or armchair natural history…. I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw. ~ Hamlet, to those errand boys Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, letting them in on the wink-wink. Now, if you’re like me when you first came across this line, you wondered “say wha?” I should hope…
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A scant note on abundance
Extinction is forever. The Anthropocene Extinction we are living through is much discussed, but in this discussion something gets lost as we attempt to save the last hundred or thousand members of a particular species of charismatic megafauna. That something is the antithesis of extinction. It is the incredible abundance of animals and plants that…
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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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Some books for the holidays
Ah, the codex! What a marvelous piece of technology the book is: simple, durable, potentially capable of lasting centuries (presuming it’s not a piece of paperback crap), and free from toxic batteries. Books are all I want for the winter festive giving season — I mean, besides peace, love, and understanding. If you know somebody…
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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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Bad to the bone
One of the great joys of the library, and to a certain extent the bookstore as well — although tempered there by the odium of commerce — is browsing. Yes, the same word is used for the internet, but it is not the same. Differences: the serendipity and physicality, for two, and the winnowing done…
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Armchair Naturalist
Printed on the back of my MetroCard (the local public transit system’s swipe fare card, which replaced the token of happy memory) as part of the “Train of Thought” program: “Within five miles of where you live, there are enough strange things to keep you wondering all your life. Probably in your dooryard may be…
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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 