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Osprey
Alan F. Poole’s Ospreys: The Revival of a Global Raptor In my half century life, there has been a great recovery of Osprey populations after ruthless persecution and even more ruthless chemical...
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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...
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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...
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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 ....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
View ArticleIn 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...
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Cuckoo, Cuckoo!
Sumer is icumen in,/ Lhude sing cucu, begins one of the oldest songs in English. The distinctive call of the male Common Cuckoo, just returned from winter in sub-Saharan Africa, has long marked the...
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The Social Wasps
Chris Alice Kratzer’s guide to The Social Wasps of North America is out and about. If you’re interested in the social wasps, and I know you are, you should really look this one up. Kratzer uses an...
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Caracaras
The cover of this book grabbed me like a raptor’s talons. This is Georg(e) Forster’s watercolor of a Striated Caracara, a species confined to the Falklands, made during Cook’s second voyage...
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Reading
Before Silent Spring, Rachel Carson wrote three books about the sea, which have now been brought together in a single Library of America volume. Some of the science is dated, but these are still...
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Insect Books
Princeton Nature is going strong these days. Eaton‘s book is a slim compendium of insect lore. Just a few of the entries: Amber, Delusory Parasitosis, Killer Bees, Seed Dispersal, Snow Insects, Xerces...
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New Book
Highly recommended. Jared Farmer’s Elderflora is unexpectedly dedicated “To the caretakers, living and dead, of Green-Wood Cemetery.” He notes elsewhere in the book that he began to outline the book...
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Wild Yards
In one sense, this is a rather depressing book. Nancy Lawson is the author of two books on the wilds of the backyard. This doesn’t seem to have had much effect on her neighbors. She’s surrounded by...
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Wild Sounds
While reading this, I heard it was nominated for a Pulitzer. Great news, because this book about the evolution of sound needs its profile raised. It’s an utterly fascinating and necessary read. Life...
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Summer of Wasps
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these three recent books about wasps were all written by entomologists. The business of science journalism, non-scientists interpreting the often obtuse...
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Wallace 200
I’m a big fan of the cover of James T. Costa’s new biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, who was born two hundred years ago in Wales. Most biography covers would of course go with a picture of the...
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An Ology of Ornos
When I was a boy, I lived near the entrance to Hades. Lago d’Averno north of Naples near Cumae was where Virgil located an entrance to the kingdom of the dead. I listened hard for the baying of the...
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