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Moth Bible
I picked up the new Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by Beadle and Leckie as soon as it came out earlier this year. I’d been anticipating it because I’ve been following...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Natural Histories
I am embarrassed to say I did not even know that the American Museum of Natural History had a research library, and within it an impressive rare book collection. Library Director Tom Baione has put...
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Nasty
Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures, by Carl Zimmer. I can’t remember who recommended this book to me, and I’m sorry about that. It may have been here or on...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Unfeathered Bird
This remarkable book goes well with chicken and, I would think, a nice dry white wine that hasn’t seen the inside of an oak barrel. Because a chicken is the closest most of us ever get to a featherless...
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Books
It’s never too late to get some books for Christmas. Here are two excellent choices for gifts: Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast: A Natural History, by Carol Gracie. Gracie, a reader of this blog,...
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Unreal Nature
On a recent trip to Croton Point, a friend noted how much he has been conditioned by television nature shows to expect spectacular close-ups, stunning cinematography and photography, and dramatic...
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Stung!
Is it too early for a couple of quick ones? Non-Russian vodka, with Bloody Mary camouflage, if you please. This book is unrelievedly depressing and despairing. It makes you want to jump in the ocean...
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Notes for Further Reading and Doing
Reading: Rob Jett’s ebook The Red-tailed Hawk Journals: A City Birder in Brooklyn is now available. Rob has been documenting the Red-tails of Brooklyn for more than a decade and tells how he first came...
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Animal Sex
It turns out that one of the best ways to tell species apart is to examine their genitals. There’s an incredible variety of forms of male and female sex organs, even within the species gathered...
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Three Books
Sometimes I find the perfect description about what I’m up to here: “In an age when the ecological integrity of our planet is threatened on so many levels, anything that strengthens those connections,...
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Bombus
A bumblebee rumbles into the heart of the flower. Identifying bumblebees of the genus Bombus is not an easy task. In their new identification guide, Bumble Bees of North America, Williams, Thorp,...
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