Popular yet thorough, shimmering with the romance of an arcane field.
A rolling history of avian bioacoustics and a few of the admittedly eccentric characters who work the dawn hours to get the songs.
Few remain unmoved by birdsong, writes Stap (English/Univ. of Central Florida), and perhaps that has always been the case: 16,000 years ago someone painted a bird with an open beak in the caves at Lascaux. On the other hand, few go to the lengths of ornithologist Don Kroodsma, the celebrated birdsong trapper who features most prominently in this exploration of the how’s and why’s of birds singing. How do songbirds go about learning their material? Or is genetics a greater factor? What is the role of regional dialects? Is there a link between dialect and speciation? What, if any, are the advantages of a large repertoire? These and other questions are strewn on the ground like so many sunflower-seed shells, but Kroodsma presents a handful of compelling theories. Many of them, unsurprisingly, have to do with mating and territoriality. While Stap succinctly lays such questions and conjectures before the reader, his principle interest is the development of avian bioacoustics. In particular, he wants to show us what it’s like to go forth and gather the raw material in the field. This fieldwork gives the book its rawest energy, for songbirds sing most spiritedly at dawn (“perhaps to signal they made it through the night”), and Stap must rise long before sunrise to keep up with the bioacousticians. Doing so, he experiences and beautifully describes a rare, antediluvian world devoid of human noise. Then, slowly picking up momentum, come the songs, cheeps, and calls, then the chorus. There is more than one true scientific approach, says Stap, but being in the birds’ natural habitat with all its uncontrollable variables, brings a wonderful authenticity to the gleanings of birdsong understanding.
Popular yet thorough, shimmering with the romance of an arcane field.Pub Date: March 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3274-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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
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