books
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Orwell’s Roses
“It is only very rarely, when I make a definitive mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines,” wrote George Orwell of shoveling coal into the fire to keep warm in London. He wrote this The Road to Wigan Pier, his reporting on the horrific condition in northern England’s…
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The Golden Age of Field Guides
Coming next year: The Social Wasps of North America Princeton Field Guide to North American Spiders Let’s face it, birds, which are where I started, are ridiculously easy when compared to lichens, spiders, bees, beetles, flies (forget it), wasps, etc. And plants are a hell of a challenge. Oh, the chlorophyl crowd looks easy with…
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Marsh
“Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger organisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous machine […] The silkworm and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the puncture of an insect on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient…
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In Praise of Geography
Tim and Máiréad Robinson earned a living by making maps. Both passed away in the early wave of COVID last spring. They were in their 80s, but god-damn the eugenicist scum who blithely write off “underlying conditions” as an excuse. (This crowd of filth, the base of a GOP lately heard bleating about how divisive…
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The Flying Zoo
The Blue Jay’s “flying zoo” includes “one flea, six species of lice, five types of ticks, and eight species of mites, in addition to being infected by nine kinds of flukes (trematodes), three tapeworms, one acanthocephalan (thorny-headed worm) and sixteen kinds of roundworms.” Michael Stock’s The Flying Zoo: Birds, Parasites and the World They Share…
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On Yeast
Apples don’t make true. That is, a seed of a Newtown Pippin—one of my favorite varieties, developed in nearby Queens in colonial days—won’t grow into a tree that produces Newtown Pippins. The resulting tree might produce Newtown Pippins, but it will also produce all sorts of other kinds of apples. The ur-apples way out in…
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Book and Flowers and Bugs
A month of summer yet, at least as the calendar goes. But Carol Gracie’s Summer Wildflowers is good the whole year through. You’ll love opening this in early January! I can’t better the foreword by NYBG’s Robert Naczi: “Gracie seamlessly integrates diverse facets about these plants—history, geography, habitats, human uses, morphology, classification, pollination, conservation, and…
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Twins
MACRO: A Planet To Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal “It is clear the political establishment is collapsing in the United States and beyond. Clinging to it makes it possible for reactionaries like Trump to gain more ground the world over and brings climate catastrophe closer. The fundamental issue is this: As the…
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Oaks to Caterpillars to Birds
The National Wildlife Foundation has a county-level guide, the Native Plant Finder, to native plants that support caterpillars. Why caterpillars? Because they are esentially the foundation of the food chain for song birds. Even the seedeaters that come to your feeders for seeds and suet in winter feed their young caterpillars. Caterpillars are relatively soft…
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Whale Ho
I came across some research that showed a Bombus bumblebee species whose members got physically smaller in competition with the commercial livestock that are honey bees. I was reminded of this when I read Richard J. King‘s reference to the shrinkage in the size of whales killed between 1900 and 1986, when the international moratorium…
Backyard and Beyond 