Skutch (A Naturalist Amid Tropical Splendor, 1987, etc.) has had the chance, the curiosity, and the resolve—for over 70 years—to observe the habits of little-known tropical birds, and the gleanings here add random, intelligent insights to our stock of avian wonder. Now 94 years old, Skutch has spent most of his life in the tropics observing animals, and for the most part birds. This collection of essays concentrates on bird behavior that runs counter to form: raptors that nurse-maid small birds of other species, birds that make their home in the nests of arboreal termites or treetop vespiaries, the hunting peculiarities of the swallow-tailed kite (it gathers insects with its feet). He covers courtship activities of long-tailed hermits and adorable coquettes, the nesting ways of snowy-breast, beryl-crown, and violet-headed hummingbirds, and birdsong (his wife once heard a grayish saltator sing “look now, you’re a great big girl”). He knows his birds like other people know their cousins: Take the piratic flycatcher, which “announces its presence by a variety of thin, breezy whistles that suggest a careless, easygoing, vagabond nature.” His piece on the resemblance of marmosets and tamarinds, two primates, to tropical birds—coloration, grooming, vocalizations, diurnality—is a stretch: it fails to coalesce into a meaningful, let alone provocative, picture. But on the whole, the observations are keen fruits of a lifetime spent behind binoculars, and the writing is dignified and unadorned. A typical leisured and place-setting lead runs: “As I walked along a woodland trail, a startled Great Tinamou rose from the ground ahead of me.” Admittedly, there is material here that falls a few sparks short of explosive—the scant depth of the rufous piha’s nest, for example—but Skutch always invests his findings with the high purpose of bell-clear scholarship, even when of the footnote variety. (27 line drawings)
Pub Date: March 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-89096-850-0
Page Count: 226
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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