books
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Dinosaurs Past and Present
What do we know about dinosaurs now and, perhaps more interestingly, how do we know these things? Michael J. Benton lays it out in Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology . Origins, taxonomy, intelligence, reproduction, diet, locomotion, and, of course, the cause(s) of extinction are topics covered here. Surely the most notable and surprising…
-
Against the Grain
“The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and states in Mesopotamia occurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on this planet. […] Measured by the roughly 200,000-year span of our species, then, the Anthropocene began only a few minutes ago.” And look what we don’t that tiny bit of our…
-
Migratory Restlessness
Of course the Germans have a word for it: Zugunruhe. Migratory restlessness is best known in birds, but other animals have it as well. In spring and fall, these animals feel the need to get a move on. Hormones trigger it. Here’s Melville making an analogy in Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852: “So…
-
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…
Backyard and Beyond 