books
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Olof Rudbeck
Some plates from den svenska ornitologins fader. Olof Rudbeck the Younger (1660-1740), sometimes Latinized as Olaus Rudbeckius junior, is considered the father of Swedish ornithology. He was also one of Linnaeus’s teachers (whence Rudbeckia). While visiting Sverige recently, I was gifted a sumptuous reprint of Rudbeck d.y.’s Svenska fâglar. It’s a wondrous tome; I’m struggling…
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Here Be Worms
A selection of J. R. R. Tolkien’s hand-drawn dragons from The Hobbit. The ones below are from the included map. The one above, not in my 30th printing of the 1966 edition, was added as a frontispiece to later editions.The collective noun for dragons is a desolation, unless you’re referring to the Asian versions, in…
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Re: Rachel Carson
I finally read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in this handy new Library of America edition with an excellent introduction by editor Sandra Steingraber. Along with the chronology and notes, the volume puts Carson in a deep context of the burgeoning environmental activism of the 1950s, which was sparked in important ways by atmospheric nuclear testing.…
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International Bird Migration Day
In Ruth Padel’s On Migration: Dangerous Journeys and the Living World, the Aeneid is offered as the great story of the present century: “the displaced man who has seen his city burn and has lost one identity forever must make a new home and new identity in an unknown land.” Padel’s book is a modern…
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Bird Boxing
It’s a little late in the year for this, but I just found this book. It’s a very good place to start if you want to set up and maintain — stress on the maintain — bird homes for the next breeding season and the ones after that. Habitat, siting, building, monitoring, maintaining are all…
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The Amateurs
The root of the word amateur is the Latin for love. In our hyper-specialized world, “amateur” has become a put-down, which is a shame. The study of birds begun with amateurs. And it’s one of the few contemporary branches of science where amateurs can still regularly rub shoulders, or wings if you prefer, with professionals.…
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Flies
They get no respect, the two-winged insects known as flies. The biters, bloodsuckers, shit-eaters, in-flesh laying parasites, maggot-spawners. Ooooog, you say, why are you doing this to me on a Sunday morning? Well, at least they’re not Republicans. There are an estimated 17 million flies for each and every human. We’d be drowning in excrement…
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Tree Omnibus
The trees are singing. If only we would listen. Tolkien suggested it might be quite hard to hear them, since they sing on a whole different time scale. David George Haskell is listening with microphones and an acute biologist’s senses. The Songs of Trees was one of last year’s best naturalist books, beautifully written and…
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Water, Water Everywhere
A toponym is a place name, a notion of maps, signs, and our heads but rarely actually written onto the land itself. These names are packed with the histories of the peoples who did the naming. Rivers in particular hold onto ancient names, however filtered by later folk, as this nation so amply demonstrates. George…
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Timber!
We caught Ted Levin talking about his book, America’s Snake: The Rise and Fall of the Timber Rattlesnake this week at the Linnaean Society. It’s a damn good book and deserves to be read far and wide. Too many people fear and loath snakes, an irrationality that leads directly to massacre. There are still bloody snake-killing…
Backyard and Beyond 