An evocative and heartfelt examination of a beautiful landscape and its fauna.
A distinguished British naturalist reflects on his encounters with the birds of the Scottish Highlands and how global warming has impacted these populations.
Set in the Highlands hamlet of Aigas, the 19 essays in the book illuminate the way birds not only “respond quickly to shifts in climate and human behavior,” but also serve as living barometers of “the success or failure of other wildlife.” Lister-Kaye (At the Water’s Edge: A Personal Quest for Wildness, 2010, etc.) notes that minute shifts in light and weather conditions—things that humans often do not notice—can severely affect not only migration patterns of seasonal birds like geese, but also the nesting patterns of other, nonmigratory birds like rooks. Temperature extremes also inevitably take their toll on bird populations. During a three-month subzero period in the winter of 2009-2010, the hardy barn owls of Aigas (where Lister-Kaye established Scotland's first field studies station in 1976) starved for want of access to the mice and voles that had taken refuge underground. The author also shows how human interventions on the landscape—e.g., electricity distribution lines—impact birds like the whooper swan, which collide with the lines and die slow, agonizing deaths. With its use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanized equipment, farming also impacts birds by killing off the bugs, beetles, and flies that feed them. Lister-Kaye’s lyrical descriptions of Aigas and the animal denizens he so clearly loves offer a poignant counterpoint to the destruction he observes. Yet for all the sadness he expresses at the way people have treated the natural world, he still offers hope that humans can work with nature by adopting the kinds of green measures—installing biomass boilers and solar collectors and “preach[ing] sustainability” to school children—that Aigas employs. In so doing, they can restore some semblance of balance in the earthly kingdom overseen by his winged “gods of the morning.”
An evocative and heartfelt examination of a beautiful landscape and its fauna.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-796-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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