A Brilliant Batch of Bird Books

With even more books on the horizon, 2012 has already been a banner year for new bird books. One of our favorite new arrivals comes from naturalist, birder, and tracker Jon Young, What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World. Young draws on worldwide indigenous knowledge, and over 40 years in the field, to show how we can tune into the behavior of birds to learn important things about our immediate environment:

“If we learn to read the birds — and their behaviors and vocalizations — through them we can read the world at large. Anyone with a working understanding of this discipline can approach an unknown habitat and quickly draw all sorts of ‘natural world’ conclusions. The types of birds seen or heard, their numbers and behaviors and vocalizations, will reveal the locations of running water or still water, dead trees, ripe fruit, a carcass, predators, fish runs, insect hatches, and so much more. The details of the habitat become very clear.”

Here’s more from Jon Young on the knowledge you can glean from birds in your midst:

“One of the first pleasant tasks for anyone interested in the methodology of bird language is to select a private place among the birds to visit as often as possible. It may be in the forest, the suburban or urban park, or the backyard. Regardless, it will be the main venue for figuring out what’s going on, for connecting the dots, for gathering the stories of the birds and their context.” — Jon Young

What the Robin Knows is a one-of-a-kind book, and an excellent volume to add to the Land Library’s ornithology shelves. As are these recent arrivals:

Kingfisher by David Chandler and Ian Llewellyn, a vivid natural history of the annual cycle of these fascinating waterside fishers, and Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense: What It’s Like to be a Bird, full of surprising bits about bird’s sense of sight, smell, hearing, touch, along with their detection of such forces as the magnetic field.

The Urban Birder by David Lindo, a book that we’ve already posted twice about. London-based David Lindo is a powerful voice that celebrates nature-in-the-city; Derek Lovitch’s How to Be a Better Birder, an excellent book that presents the finer points to observing birds in the field — highlighting the importance of habitat, ecology, and even weather.

Peregrine Falcon by Patrick Stirling-Aird, from the same publishers of Kingfisher (above), another wonderfully illustrated natural history, this time of one of the world’s fastest raptors.

For more on the peregrine, here’s two of our earlier posts:

–The Peregrine Sketchbook of C.F. Tunnicliffe

–Assume the Stillness of a Tree, on J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, one of the Land Library Book Club’s all-time favorite reads!

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Righteous Insects & Hope for Slugards Like You and Me

“Go to the ant thou slugard, study her ways and be wise.” Proverbs 6:6

E.O. Wilson has called Jae Choe’s Secret Lives of Ants one of the best books ever written on these incredibly important insects. Choe provides us with a fascinating natural history of one of the most dominant life forms on the planet. Vivid up-close color photographs complement Choe’s well-told tales of army ants, fire ants, weaver, aztec, carpenter, and leaf-cutter ants, to name just a few.

From start to finish, Secret Lives of Ants pays special attention to the amazingly intricate relationships that constitute ant societies. And given the slugards we all are, Jae Choe recommends important life lessons the ant has to share: “The Chinese character for ant is a combination of the characters for righteousness and insect. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese had already understood the unusual ability of these righteous insects to sacrifice their individual needs for the good of their society.“

And here’s another favorite passage from Jae Choe’s Secret Lives of Ants, where he describes a memorable encounter he had as a graduate student in Costa Rica:

“After I stepped into the forest, I lost track of time. The canopy was so dense that it was dark even in the middle of the day. Suddenly, I caught a glimpse of tiny leaves moving. I froze in my tracks on the narrow trail. Those were not just leaves swaying in the breeze, it was a real leaf-cutter ant parade….

A great deal of research has been done on these ants due to their unusual habit of carrying leaves back to their nests to use as a cultivation medium for growing mushrooms. They have earned the name leaf-cutter ants because they go into the forest to get leaves just like woodcutters go into the forest to cut down trees to get a supply of wood. They use their heavy, serrated jaws like saws to cut the leaves they then take back to the nest.

I followed the leaf-cutter ants parade until the sun went down, and after I returned to the research station I began to wonder if the ants continued to march in the dark….I strapped a light to my head and headed back into the forest. The area was full of all kinds of poisonous snakes and spiders, and even jaguars, but my curiosity was greater than my fear, so I forged ahead. Surprisingly, when I found the ants again in the pitch-black jungle night, they were not carrying leaves; they were carrying pink flower petals. This beautiful parade of flower petals was simply mesmerizing.“

Here’s a few more ant resources from the Land Library’s shelves, including an excellent book on ants of the leaf-cutting variety!

The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson, and Mark W. Moffett’s Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions — a fun book that was the subject of two past posts.

Plus two more from our Waterton Canyon Kids Nature Library: The Life and Times of the Ant by Charles Micucci, and The Story of Ants by Dorothy Shuttlesworth.

Given their vivid photographs and illustrations, kids books can provide anyone an excellent introduction to the world of ants. You never know where your first guide will come from. We wish we could say that the likes of Jean-Henri Fabre or E.O. Wilson first introduced us to the empire of the ants, but actually it was the writers and artists of Marvel Comics — a fun place to begin!

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Learning As You Go

Travel season is upon us, and if your itinerary includes the world’s first national park, the Land Library strongly recommends the University of California Press’ massive new Atlas of Yellowstone. With over 250 pages of maps, graphs, and supportive text, this atlas covers a wide range of topics, including Native American history, rivers, wildlife, settlement history, geothermal activity, fire — and, last but not least, the supervolcano that underlies it all:

The Path of the Yellowstone Hot Spot: one of many well-executed cartographic images from the Atlas of Yellowstone.

Wherever you may travel, remember this: travel light, but always bring books! Here’s a few more excellent travel companions from the Land Library’s shelves:

Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country by Marc S. Hendrix — from geysers and volcanics to glacier-sculpted peaks, this is an excellent guide to one of our most geologically important national parks. And for an excellent introduction to Yellowstone’s history, George Black has written a massive new book, Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone.

And there’s plenty of fun books you can add to any young adventurer’s bulging backpack:

The Wolves are Back by Jean Craighead George, with paintings by Wendell Minor, a beautifully done picture book on the wolf’s reintroduction to Yellowstone — an excellent lesson on how the presence of one animal can profoundly effect an entire ecosystem. Also pictured above: Yellowstone Moran: Painting the American West by Lita Judge. Artist Thomas Moran was a member of the 1871 Hayden Survey. His paintings helped persuade Congress to declare Yellowstone a National Park the very next year.

Yellowstone’s ability to inspire remains strong. Park Ranger Shelton Johnson was featured in one of our past posts, and his words still move us deeply:

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